Submitting content to the Search Engines
XML Site Map
After you have edited a node in your website, the content will be obviously different to the next visitor.
If you were to Google the new modifed node content it may not show up in the organic listing for awhile. This is because the search engine spiders have not yet come back to your website to see what's new. Since the World Wide Web is so large and growing it may take days - weeks - months depending on your website and a variety of other factors.
What the XML Site Map does is tell the major search engines that you have new content for them to spider.
Adding new content is one of the key ways major search engines use to measure relevancy. The premise is, if you are updating regularly, your website will be ranked more favorably vs. a website unchanged for 6 years.
This proactive approach gets your new content spidered sooner.
PS...More frequent spidering is what you want the search engine to do!
The Ping Module
Useful for notifying interested sites that your site has changed. It automatically sends notifications (called "pings") to the pingomatic service to tell it that your site has changed. In turn pingomatic will ping other services such as weblogs.com, Technorati, blo.gs, BlogRolling, Feedster.com, Moreover, etc. The ping module requires |  |