Sitemaps help web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. If your content is continously updated, then you should let the search engines know that your XML file of all your site links has been updated. To date, Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo support the Sitemap 0.90 protocol. Visit sitemaps.org for the sitemap XML format, if you haven’t already created one. There are also websites that will create a sitemap for you.

Here is a solution you can use in your ColdFusion applications which will alert the four major search engines that your sitemap has been refreshed.

The code is fairly easy. First, we wrap our code in a <cftry> with a <cfcatch> if something goes wrong. Then, we use the <cfhttp> tag to send a request to the sitemap ping service specified by the particular search engine. The "redirect" attribute is important because, by default, <cfhttp> will redirect to the URL specified in the tag. We choose "no" to allow for multiple pings in one process. After the ping is made to the service we set a variable for the header status code. 200 OK is a successful request and 404 Not Found means the page was not accessed. Once all of the selected pings have run, the use <cfmail> to email the results.

Ask: #AskPingStatus#

Google: #GooglePingStatus#

MSN: #MSNPingStatus#

Yahoo: #YahooPingStatus#



     

     #cfcatch#
     
     

This code can be run either when a sitemap is updated, or as a scheduled task. I prefer to ping the sitemap services when I create my feed.

Did you find this ColdFusion code useful? Let me know.