Sitemap ping Endpoint is Going Away | Google New Update | The lastmod element Update on sitemap

The Sitemaps Protocol was established in 2005 to assist search engines in discovering new URLs as well as scheduling new crawls of previously discovered URLs. It’s a well-known protocol that hasn’t been altered in over 15 years. While the overall concept remains beneficial, some components have grown less applicable in today’s internet. To that purpose, we’re deprecating the sitemaps “ping“ endpoint and offering further guidelines for using the lastmod element. The sitemap method specifies an unauthenticated REST way for providing sitemaps to search engines. Our internal research, as well as the findings of other search engines such as Bing, indicate that unauthenticated sitemap submissions are currently ineffective. In fact, in the case of Google Search, the vast majority of submissions result in spam. To illustrate, we are deprecating our support for sitemaps ping, and the endpoint will cease to work after 6 months. You can still submit sitemaps using and S