Hi everyone,

many of you reported a "Sitemaps ping is deprecated - Error 404" error message when trying to use the sitemap update function on Google after having exported the website online.

As Google states in its official article linked within the error message, the sitemap ping function was deprecated in June 2023 and, as of 2024, it is no longer available since it is no longer considered to be useful:

"Sitemap ping
The sitemap protocol defines an unauthenticated REST method for submitting sitemaps to search engines. Our internal studies—and also other search engines such as Bing—tell us that at this point these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are not very useful. In fact, in the case of Google Search, the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam. To wit, we're deprecating our support for sitemaps ping and the endpoint will stop functioning in 6 months. You can still submit your sitemaps through robots.txt and Search Console, but the HTTP requests ("pings") to the deprecated REST endpoint will result in a 404 error. Any existing code or plugins which use this endpoint will not cause problems for Google Search; you don't need to make any changes (but using the endpoint will also not do anything useful)."

To update the sitemap, you will then have to follow the alternative solutions suggested by Google, such as the Search Console. The button for the sitemap ping function will no longer be available in the upcoming software versions. 

For more information, see: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/06/sitemaps-lastmod-ping

Thanks!

Incomedia Team