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SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
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• Kalena Jordan
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• Titus Hoskins

Reader Rescue: Does Ask.com Accept XML Sitemaps?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hi Kalena

I have uploaded my XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and more recently Bing, thanks to your blog post about the Bing Webmaster Center.

However, I’m wondering if Ask.com accept XML sitemaps and if so, how do I upload mine to Ask?

thanks
Georgia

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Hello Georgia

Yes, Ask.com DO support XML Sitemap submissions. Here’s a blurb about it from their Webmaster Help area:

“Yes, Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared a sitemap for your site, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt, or submit the sitemap file directly to us via the ping URL”

The ping URL is as follows:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

To add your sitemap to your robots.txt file, simply include this line:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Actually it’s not just Ask that supports the addition of sitemaps in robots.txt. Did you know that both Google and Yahoo also support that method of sitemap delivery?

You can either submit your sitemap via the search engine’s appropriate submission interface (e.g. Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center) or specify your sitemap location in your robots.txt file as per the above instructions.

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Send it to kjordan [ at ] sitepronews [ dot ] com and you might see it featured here.

Sitemaps and SEO

By WebAssist in Featured

Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website could be the easiest thing you do to improve your exposure on the web. For those of you who pay close attention to the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site, this could be the one thing that gets you onto the first page of Google’s results. For those who don’t devote too much time on the SEO of their site – this is a good place to start. By submitting a sitemap to various search engines, you are telling them that you exist and what pages your site has to offer the World Wide Web.

There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your site. While XML sitemaps play an important role in helping the search engine “crawl” the various pages of your site. This Roadmap discusses the benefit of creating both an HTML sitemap and XML sitemap, and how you can go about creating them using a sitemap generator.