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If Google knows about our sitemaps and they’re being crawled on a daily basis, why should we use the http ping and /or list the index files in our robots.txt? Is there a benefit (i.e. improving indexability) to using both ping and listing index files in robots? Is there any benefit to listing the index sitemaps in robots if we’re pinging? If we provide a decent <lastmod>date is there going to be any difference in indexing rates between ping and the normal crawl that they do today?</lastmod> Do we need to all to cover our bases? thanks Marika