problogger

Sitemaps Standard Still Non-Functional

I was all excited about the sitemaps standard when I first heard about it. The catch is, it's not clear when everyone will support it. This URL indicates that the following URL-template:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

is used to ping the various search engines to let them know that a sitemap is present, or updated in the sitemaps standard. I've attempted the following requests:

yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
google.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
msn.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

A grand total of zero of them work. So when will it be implemented? I sit here with my chapter on sitemaps and wonder what I should cover. My coauthor and I have decided to leave the chapter as-is, but note that this standard is upcoming, and looking a lot like the Google standard.