The Help Centers

Following on the tails of how to create a sitemap file. Now that you have your site map all ready how do you let search engines know about it? There are a really two ways. One is ‘Passive Submission’ the other ‘Active Submission’. Read More Below...

To passively submit a site map add a reference to your site map in your robots.txt file. If you have a robots.txt add the following line (with proper URL for your site map
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
If you don’t have a robots.txt just create a file with the above line. When (and if) a search engine comes along it will look for the robots.txt and then pull the sitemap.

For those who CAN’T wait I’ve got a few links to use to submit your sitemap. I still recommend the above method in addition to the below.

Google - http://www.google.com/webmastertools this will let you (with a bit of tweaking) tell Google about your site. It also has a few other useful tools to help you optimize your site for Google. It gives a LOT of feedback on when it downloaded your sitemap and crawled your site.

Yahoo - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ Similar to Google’s webmaster tools lets you submit your site map. It also gives a lot of information about your site and feedback on the submission process.

Ask.com - Just open the following link (you MUST MUST MUST edit the link before) http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=URL
Where URL is the URL of your sitemap URLs must be escaped so http:// is http%3A// this simply gives you an OK we got it type of response so watch your logs to confirm they really are searching your site(within a day or two)

MSN Live - They haven’t gotten sitemaps working just year (end if 2007 is their goal) but they recommend putting it in your robots.txt In the meantime you can submit your site at http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx

On a NEW site I’ve had Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live crawling within 3 days… Much better than the two weeks many say it takes to crawl. And some pages have even appeared within a week in the search engines itself.

That concludes this part of Submitting your Site to Search engines. I hope these tips are quick, easy and profitable for you!