How to index a sitemap in Google without entering their Search Console
The mainstream understanding is that there are only two ways to index your website in Google, via a sitemap submission, or a Fetch as Google request (both found in the Google Search Console, after you have verified your website).
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However there is actually a third, lesser known way to index your web pages, which is useful if you do not want to (or cannot) submit your domain name into the Search Console.
Pinging Your Sitemap To Google
Yes you can ping the Google bot to notify them that you’re sitemap has been updated, and that they should crawl your new pages.
First you will need your sitemap url, for example this site has the sitemap url of:
http://blog.matt-jackson.com/sitemap_index.xml
Next you will need to add that to the following url to notify Google of your sitemaps location:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
So the full url together in this site example is:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://blog.matt-jackson.com/sitemap_index.xml
And if you visit this url you will see the following message:
The Success Message
Sitemap Notification Received
Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
This suggests that they may not always index the sitemap, but from my personal experience I have found it works 100% of the time.
Extra Indexing Technique For WordPress
Google indexes pages with Youtube videos on more quickly than simple text based pages, and this provides us a way to index websites even more quickly.
To index your pages almost instantly, we want to combine the url we mentioned above, but with a video sitemap. This will require you to have a Youtube video embedded on your most important pages.
The best WordPress plugin I have found for this is here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/youtube-video-sitemap-generator/
This will produce you a video sitemap containing all the video embeds on your website, which you simply need to add to the end of our ping url to index your website.
http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/sitemap-video.xml
Thoughts?
Do you have any ways of indexing your site that most wouldn’t know about?
Share them in the comments!
