The Sitemaps Protocol was introduced in 2005
to help search engines with the discovery of new URLs, and also to help with scheduling new
crawls of already discovered URLs. It’s a wildly popular protocol that hasn’t changed for
over 15 years. While the general idea is still useful, some aspects have become less practical
in today’s internet.
To that end, we’re announcing deprecation of the sitemaps ‘ping’ endpoint and providing
additional recommendations for the use of the lastmod element.