Sitemaps ping endpoint is going away

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.