All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask) use the XML Sitemaps protocol for getting URLs from websites.

Of course they all still use good old-fashioned crawling, but the XML sitemap can be helpful for getting new content indexed quicker and also helping spot errors using other tools the search engines offer. Simply put, if you don’t have an XML sitemap already, we suggest you get one. XML-Sitemaps.com offers a free service that works very well, and you can also download (not free) a version to run on your own server.

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All blog platforms send out pings using the XML-RPC protocol whenever a new post is created or an old one is updated. It is very simple to send out XML-RPC pings using C#, because it is just a normal HTTP request with some XML in the request body. See here how to ping using C#.

To send a ping is the client part of the transaction. There must also be a server to intercept the ping – an endpoint. Feedburner is probably the most widely used by blogs at the moment. What happens is that when you write a post, the blog engine sends a ping to Feedburner’s XML-RPC endpoint. In the XML body of the ping request is the URL of your blog so Feedburner knows who sent the ping. It then retrieves your blog’s RSS feed, parses it, and spits it out to your readers. That’s how simple and powerful it is to use XML-RPC pings.

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