Feature suggestion: sitemap pinging to google webmasters website

Question

First of all, I would like to say thank you for the great effort on making this great Q&A system. it's really great!

The auto sitemap feature is really great, and I have a small suggestion to make it even better.

On google's help page there is a small tutorial, describing a way to ping to google on changes in sitemap. The tutorial is here:
 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=183669

My suggestion is to implement a feature which will auto ping google when a new question is added to the website. The ping can be done using a simple HTTP request, to the sitemap url as a parameter to google webmasters - for example, to

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz

This will  be great for webmasters which are using sitemaps, and do not want to manually re-submit the sitemap to google every day or so.

Will be glad to hear your thoughts,
Thanks.

Answer 1

It's kind of pointless to be suggesting to Google that they download your sitemap every time there is a new question. Perhaps once a day would work, but Google will download your sitemap often enough anyway - if you have new pages every day, Google will detect that and crawl your site faster.

Constantly pinging Google won't always make them download your sitemap faster. Plus there are no problems crawling Q2A sites so a sitemap doesn't really add that much anyway!

Answer 2

If you really wanted to implement this, I think this is the sort of problem that would be quite effectively solved with the new event API, perhaps with code from this site which I found a while ago:

http://www.gidnetwork.com/b-54.html

You could keep track of the last time you pinged in an extra database table, and ping at some (suitably long) interval when you trap the q_post event.

However, DisgruntledGoat is absolutely right; pinging too regularly is not going to make them visit you any more often. It might perhaps help with some other sitemap-consuming services, though.