le will deprecate Sitemaps endpoint in the later part of this year.
Google will deprecate support for sitemaps-ping, and the endpoint won’t work by the end this year. Google announced that it will be deprecating the sitemaps ping endpoint. This means HTTP ping requests are going to result in a “404” error.
What is Sitemap Ping? Google stated that the sitemap protocol is a non-authenticated REST submission method to search engines. This is a method of notifying search engine that the sitemap has been updated.
Why does Google no longer support sitemaps? Google has stated that it’s “internal research” and “other search engines like Bing” have concluded that these “unauthenticated sitemap” submissions “are not very useful at this time.” Google also said that the “vast majority” of submissions leads to spam.
What alternatives are there? Google says you can still submit sitemaps via Google Search console as well as your robots.txt file. Google says you can also include the lastmod attribute in your sitemap if you’re confident that you have the correct date.
Google said, “If you have a CMS that changes a small piece of text on the footer or sidebar, then there is no need to update the Lastmod for the page.” If you have changed the main text, changed or added structured data or updated links, update the Lastmod value.
Google does not yet use priority or changefreq elements in sitemaps.
SEO implications. Google stated that “Any code or plugins using this endpoint won’t cause any problems for Google Search. You don’t have to make any modifications (but using this endpoint also will not do anything helpful).”
Google doesn’t care if your content is picked up slower or not.
Why we care. Just a reminder that the ping endpoint support will be removed later this year. If you use a CMS or custom code that sends Google updates with your sitemaps, you might decide to remove these pings by the end of the year. You’ll also want to make sure your lastmod data are accurate and useful.
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