How to tell Google and Bing to come and re-crawl sitemap

Question

I'm new in SEO, I have a web application can let user post their own page. I have use PHP to update sitemap.xml (daily.)

How often do Google and Bing come back to crawl my sitemap? Do I need to do any setting in webmaster tool? How can I tell Google and Bing to come back and crawl my sitemap?

Solution 1

I cannot answer for Bing, but for Google, the best thing to do is wait. Google will not recheck your sitemap every time they visit, but depending upon how often it has changed in the past, Google will assign a TTL (time to live) style value to your sitemap that dictates how often to check the sitemap for changes. If your sitemap changes often, then Google will check it more often. My sitemap changes between every one to two weeks. That is exactly how often Google checks for changes. However, I do warn you, if you try and refresh or resubmit your sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools, you will interrupt this process and unfortunately, you will end up waiting longer. Another warning. If your sitemap indicates that it has changed and Google fetches it and there is no change, it will not update the TTL for that file. So even if I regenerate my sitemap daily, but there is no actual change, then the modify date cannot be trusted and Google will only update the TTL according to when it actually sees a change. For a period, this may be largely unsettled, but will become more regular as Google takes more chances. Keep in mind that Google checks for additions or changes, but may ignore dates and variables that are associated with regenerating the sitemap. So, for example, if no pages are added, Google may see your sitemap as not having changed.

Solution 2

For Bing you can hit the following url (http://www.bing.com/ping?sitemap=http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) and it will re-read your sitemap. I'm not sure long it takes to update their search results after that.

You'll probably want to join both Bing's and Google's Webmaster Tools to get more details on the status of the indexing.

Comments

[user2178521]

if I add new page, can I delete old page from sitemap?(because it can only have 50k url)

[closetnoc]

Check out: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453 This is how to take several sitemaps and wrap them using a (you guessed it) sitemap. I do this. I create my various sitemaps with 45,000 (just in case) entries, and create an index sitemap to wrap them.