So Google, Yahoo and MSN have all approved an xml sitemap specification that allows you to submit a sitemap with advice to spiders on your site’s contents and how they may best be spidered.  This extension allows you to send a ‘ping’ to Yahoo and Google, letting them know that your sitemap has been updated and that a new one should be used.

To install, simply download, unzip, upload the lang.map_pings.php file to the system/lang/english/ folder and the ext.map_pings.php file to the system/extensions/ folder.  Go to ‘Admin- Utilities- Extension manager’ and enable the extension.  You then to enter some settings:
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The url of your sitemap is required- and the sitemap must have already been submitted and accepted by each search engine you want to ping.  You can also specify whether each ping is checked to submit by default (just like your default ping server settings- though these are sitewide rather than an individual setting.)

Now when you go to publish or edit an entry, you’ll find a new tab that allows you to select whether to send sitemap pings (these aren’t ‘normal’ pings- thus you can’t simply use the existing ping interface).  It looks something like:
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A few notes about this extension:
- If you are editing an entry, by default the pings will NOT be selected, even if your settings specify they should be.  Defaults are honored only for new entries.
- Just like regular pings, no sitemap pings are sent when using quicksave.
- If there are regular ping errors, sitemap pings end up not being set.  Nor will you get any error message- processing basically stops before it gets to the hook I’m using.
- If sitemap pings fail, you’ll get a message - just like the one you get when regular pings fail.  Otherwise, it proceeds along as normal.