Google has made an important decision related to the sitemap’s endpoint in the recent event. It has announced to deprecate sitemaps ping endpoint by the end of the year 2023. It means that a 404 error will occur when you request HTTP ping.
In a recent event, the CEO of Google said, “We will now deprecate sitemaps ping endpoint by the end of this year. Sitemap protocol is an unauthenticated REST method to submit sitemaps for search engines and helps in SEO. This protocol is the method of pinging or notifying search engines when the sitemap is updated.
Many internal studies and other search engines do not support unauthenticated sitemap submissions. They say that these submissions are not useful as most of them are spam.”
The CEO further added, “There are two ways by which the users can still submit sitemaps. They include robots. txt files and Google search console. Users must use the last mod element in the sitemap file. If the CMS of the user changes the unwanted piece of text in the sidebar or footer, the user should not update the last mod value for the page. If the users change the primary text or add structured data, it is necessary to update the last mod value.
This step will decrease spam and enhance the quality of search results. It will help to improve the visibility of the website and grow the organic traffic of the business. This step will be executed by the company within 6 months and the users must stop using sitemaps soon.
The company took this decision because of the many drawbacks of using sitemaps. These sitemaps do not index the content effectively. They also reduce the organic traffic that comes on your website.”
The CEO further listed the benefits of removing sitemaps. The factors like backlinks and internal linking will become more important while optimizing the websites. Apart from that, the last mod element will also come into the role as Google will now depend on the last mod element to see the updated pages. It is important to get an accurate last element for every page.
Some other alternatives will now replace the role of sitemaps in helping search engines understand the content and structure of the websites. Digital marketing company use alternatives that include hreflang tags and robots.txt which help in getting an engaging website and improving the online presence of small businesses and startups.
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