Is it Safe to Use Sitemap Pingers?

You may be wondering whether pinging your blog sitemap to search engines through available sitemap pingers is safe. It should be safe unless you overdo it that search engines flag you as spamming. It should be safe unless you do it through red-flagged sitemap ping services.

What’s a sitemap pinger?

A sitemap pinger is a website that provides a ping service where by using the service you send information to search engines that your blog has updates that need to be crawled and indexed. Some of these services are free and some are paid.

There are many sitemap ping services available on the internet such as Pingler and Ping-o-matic. These two websites have a good reputation for pinging blog sitemaps to various search engines. Many bloggers suggest using these two websites for a faster index.

Usually, to use a sitemap ping service, you need to prepare your blog's sitemap URL. After successfully opening a sitemap ping service provider site, you only need to enter your blog's sitemap URL and press the ping button provided.

While you can actually ping the sitemap manually, using a service like the one I mentioned above has the advantage that you don't have to ping the sitemap to different search engines individually. Your sitemap will be sent to almost all search engines simultaneously so you can save time and effort.

How a sitemap pinger works?

A sitemap pinger works via an HTTP request along with your blog's sitemap URL which is sent to search engines, just like you would via a manual sitemap ping. Your blog's sitemap URL will be recorded by search engines into a queued list of sitemaps or URLs to be crawled.

Normally, we use the webmaster panel to submit our blog sitemap. In this way, we can track the progress of the number of URLs on our blog that have been crawled and indexed. Some sitemap ping services have a tracking feature where we can get the same information provided by the webmaster panel. However, in general, the pinger sitemap service does not offer us this information unless we create an account on their website and use a paid service.

Is it safe to use sitemap pinger services?

There should be no harm in using a sitemap ping service available on the internet. However, you need to consider the following:

Don't overdo it

In Google's documentation, we are advised not to submit sitemaps more than once an hour. Of course, we can ship more than two or three times in one day. It would be nice if we ping the sitemap only when we do an update on our blog, whether there is new content or updates to old content.

Only use reputable websites

You should be wary of the many websites that offer sitemap ping services to search engines because some of these websites may have high spam scores. Before you decide to use a sitemap ping service, you should check the website's spam score.

To check a website's spam score, visit a spam score checker website such as Semrush or Website SEO Checker and enter the URL of the website you want to check. Pay attention to the SS number (short for spam score). If the SS number is above 5%, you should just leave the sitemap ping service provider.

In using a sitemap ping service, you can use various types of sitemaps on your blog. You can use the built-in sitemap, atom, or RSS. Here are the URLs for each sitemap on your blog (I'm assuming you're using Blogger):

1. Default sitemap: https://yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
2. Atom sitemap: https://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=999
3. RSS sitemap: https://yourblog.blogspot.com//feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I should mention that you should only submit one sitemap URL each time you ping a sitemap because they perform the same function; and have the same content.

On the Atom sitemap, you can make adjustments by setting the start-index and max-results parameter values if you want to index URLs that have not been crawled by search engines. Are you ready to use the sitemap ping service now?