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My website has 6milions pages of companies. ex: www.mywebsite.com/company-a

I will generate one sitemap index file and put the url in robots.txt

When the company A update one information in your page(example: address), I will change the lastmod in sitemap file that contais the url www.mywebsite.com/company-a and I will change the lastmod for this sitemap in sitemap index file. After, I will send a ping for google to my sitemap index file url.

My question is: Is it really worth doing this? What would be the gain in relation to not doing this update and send ping?

oniram
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  • IMO a sitemap is just for pages which aren't easy to find when crawling. So no. – Martijn Mar 30 '17 at 13:51
  • Do not ping Google. Just edit the file. Google will see the update when they care to. If all of your pages are linked and/or indexed already, Google will not care that you updated it in the sitemap. It will determine on it's own when to fetch your pages based upon it's own algos. Changing the lastmod date will largely be ignored. As well, sitemaps are used primarily for auditing the ability to crawl your site. If you cannot link all of your pages, then the sitemap will have value. But only as much as discovering URLs. – closetnoc Mar 30 '17 at 15:26
  • How do you ping Google? – unor Mar 31 '17 at 12:49
  • I ping google with url: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url – oniram Apr 03 '17 at 17:52

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Google's John Mueller says:

Sure, feel free to ping us when you have new or updated content!

Many CMS (including WordPress) also have a Sitemap generator either built-in or available as a plugin / extension. Those Sitemap generators will often also ping Google when you have changed or added content, making it easy for us to crawl and index that content as soon as possible once it's up. Google won't be upset if you ping too frequently (but doing so without changes on your site doesn't make sense either), so ping away!

Which makes it sound like generating a sitemap of new content and pinging Google could spur Googlebot into action. However, Google has said they don't usually use lastmod. Google ignores it because most webmasters don't keep it up to date. Google: We Mostly Ignore The LastMod Tag In XML Sitemaps.

I've seen pinging Google work nicely for fresh content. You can ping Googlebot to come fetch the page quickly after publishing it. That prevents scraper sites from copying quickly and getting Google to see it on their site first. I haven't seen much evidence that pinging Google gets Googlebot to come back and index updated content more quickly.

Stephen Ostermiller
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  • Those extension ping to Googlebot in programmatic way, but here OP ping sitemap into Google search console account manually which is not worth of time. – Goyllo Jan 05 '18 at 07:11
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    According to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668, "Google ignores and values, so don't bother adding them. Google reads the value, but if you misrepresent this value, we will stop reading it." – Christhofer Natalius Jun 09 '20 at 06:40