Below is a is list of URL’s to ping search engines with your XML sitemaps (For more info on Sitemaps see )

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Live Search: http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Another Service (Just heard its good to use :S): http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

Hope this list helps someone

I know I am probably about a year too late, but I have just stumbled on http://stackoverflow.com

Man what a totally amazing site!!  I asked a (Really dumb) question that I have wanted to know the answer to for a while and 58 seconds later I got two excellent answers – I’m just amazed I have only just found this.

If like me you struggle to get your head round some of the more advanced ASP.NET stuff you see people like Haack and Mr Gu doing then just ask on http://stackoverflow.com!!  Excellent resource and a really well written site, some very clever features and I think very clever algorithms for matching questions.

I have been building our new content management system, and I knew that our first site to be using it would need have a lot of pages 301 redirected as we are going to change the file structure and pages names (And the old site has has a lot of SEO done).  So I thought it would be a great ‘Admin Tool’ to be able to add the old and new pages into a table and if a 404 was served (One of the old pages) check against the pages in the database and 301 redirect the page to the new one.

So I made a simple table which held the OldURL & NewURL More...

If you are building a new ASP.NET application, SEO has become a big factor in how you plan the structure / code of the site.  But quite an important part of the site which are often overlooked are the URL’s, and a lot of people do the basics which I’ll show below but there are a few common things people tend to miss or never thought could be a problem. I use ISAPI rewrite for most of my sites, which is an amazingly effective tool for sorting duplicate content and SEO issues which I’ll show below

1.) Rewrite your URL’s to be useful / descriptive and stick away from using the old dynamic way

i.e. mypage.aspx?e=54&b=99

Google even tell you this is not ideal in the webmaster guidelines (See bottom of Design & Content Guidelines section) - http://www.google.co.uk/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hlrm=en_uk More...

In our CMS I have a custom URL rewriting module that creates SEO friendly URLS based on the users page name.  This was great and worked well, but I have noticed over the past couple of years that even though Google say they treat .aspx, .php extensions the same as static .htm pages - .htm pages just seem to do better in the SERPS for the sites I have managed. More...

So before I start I thought I would say yes, I pretty much am an ASP.NET novice compared to most but I have built quite a few website's in ASP.NET VB & C#, most recently my sports social network PlayerFind which is where I was really toyed between learning MVC or just sticking to my webforms!  I had the idea for PlayerFind at the beginning of last year and as I started and stopped building it I heard more and more about ASP.NET MVC and being an ASP.NET nut I was very eager to give it a whirl, but after really reading into it I just don't get it! So here's a list of things I read that make the MVC way of doing things much better to use, and why this dumb novice just doesn't get it. More...

January last year I was asking round my friends if someone would be interested in having a few games of Tennis so I could get back into playing, but alas not one was interested! So I hunted around and found the only way I was going to find someone local would be to join a club which a) I just didn't have the time to go all the time on a certain day and b) would cost me quite a bit of money. 

So I had the idea of building a site where I could find a Tennis partner, I then saw the bigger picture and started mapping out a site that you could find another player for any sport or activity!  Well soon after I fired up Visual Studio and jumped straight in...  Shit... After about a week I realised how much work would be involved to make it work, as the search had to be good, site easy to use and most important needed to be a mini social network to make people want to come back! More...