Submitting XML Sitemaps to search engines is one of the most important activity that every webmaster should do to establish web presence and get more search engine traffic such as google, yahoo and msn (bing).

Submit XML Sitemaps

Google

http://www.google.com/webmaster

Yahoo

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

MSN/Bing

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Ping Your Sitemaps
Whenever you have new contents on your website, you can send a ping to search engines and telling them the location of your XML Sitemap so that they will come along and index it. Basically here’s how it works and you would need a little programming knowledge to understand what this is doing. PHP code example shown below.

Google Sitemap Ping
$pingurl = “www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=” . urlencode($url);

Google Sitemap Ping
$pingurl = “http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=” . urlencode($url);

Yahoo Sitemap Ping
$pingurl = “http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=” . $appid . “&url=” . urlencode($url);

Ask Sitemap Ping
$pingurl = “http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=” . urlencode($url);

where $url would be the location where your XML Sitemap is located (ex. either http://www.davidtan.org/sitemap.xml or http://www.davidtan.org/sitemap.xml.gz)

You could then use wget or curl to issue the HTTP request and check if the response code is 200 to determine if the ping was successful.