Google will be deprecating support for sitemap ping and the endpoint at the end of this year. Google said is announcing the “deprecation of sitemaps ‘ping’ endpoint”. This means that HTTP ping requests will result in a 404 error.
What is sitemap ping. Google said that the sitemap protocol defines a unauthenticated REST method to submit sitemaps to search engines. It’s a way to “ping” or notify search engines that your sitemap has been updated.
Why is Google ending? support Google said that its “internal studies” as well as “other search engines like Bing” say “that at this time these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are not very useful.” Google said “the vast majority of submissions lead to spam.”
What are the alternatives? Google said you can still submit your sitemaps through both Google Search Console and robots.txt files. Google said you should also use the lastmod element in your sitemap file when you’re sure the date you’re listing is when the page actually changed.
Google added: “If your CMS has changed an insignificant piece of text in the sidebar or footer, you don’t need to update the lastmod value for that page. However, if you’ve changed the main text, added or changed structured data or updated some links, update the lastmod value.”
Google does not yet use priority or change frequency elements for sitemaps.
SEO Consequences. Google said “Any existing code or plugins that use this endpoint won’t cause problems in Google Search – you don’t need to make any changes (but using the endpoint won’t do anything useful either).
Your content may or may not be picked up a little slower without ping support, but Google isn’t concerned about that.
Why we care This is just a warning that ping sitemap endpoint support will be gone later this year. So if you have custom code or use a CMS that pings Google with these updates, you may decide to remove them later this year. You’ll also want to make sure your lastmod data is accurate and useful.
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