Monday, June 26, 2023
The Sitemaps Protocol was introduced in 2005 to help search engines with the discovery of new URLs, and also to help with scheduling new crawls of already discovered URLs. It's a wildly popular protocol that hasn't changed for over 15 years. While the general idea is still useful, some aspects have become less practical in today's internet.
To that end, we're announcing deprecation of the sitemaps "ping" endpoint and providing additional
recommendations for the use of the lastmod element.
Sitemap ping
The sitemap protocol defines an
unauthenticated REST method
for submitting sitemaps to search engines. Our internal studies—and also other
search engines such as Bing—tell
us that at this point these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are not very useful. In fact,
in the case of Google Search, the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam. To wit, we're
deprecating our support for sitemaps ping and the endpoint will stop functioning in 6 months. You
can still
submit your sitemaps through robots.txt and Search Console,
but the HTTP requests ("pings") to the deprecated REST endpoint will result in a 404
error. Any existing code or plugins which use this endpoint will not cause problems for Google
Search; you don't need to make any changes (but using the endpoint will also not do anything
useful).
The lastmod element
Over the years we've observed a varying level of usefulness of the lastmod element
across the sites that provide it. This may have been the result of the kind of content that's
published, or perhaps the content management system, but nowadays lastmod is indeed
us