subject: To Ping Or Not To Ping - The Importance Of Pinging Your Blog! [print this page] To Ping Or Not To Ping - The Importance Of Pinging Your Blog!
You should be pinging your blog each time you update your site with fresh content!
Pinging your blog allows you to automatically let the blog directories and search engines know that your blog has been updated.
One of the main reasons you should be pinging your blog is the search engines will quickly index your site, and thus drive traffic to it from several other sources.
One word of caution If you are using a WordPress blog, by default, any time you hit the "Update" button WordPress will ping your blog. If you're like me and make several changes along the way, this can be detrimental.
Pinging your blog too often will alert the search engines and you may be considered spamming Worse yet, you could even get your website banned!
There is a work-around that I've found, it's a plug-in for WordPress called, Ultimate Plugins,Smart Update Pinger
This plug-in will allow pinging your blog to happen only when you tell it to.
From the creators website:
Features:
1. Services are only pinged when a new post is created (not when an existing post is edited)
2. For future posts, services are only pinged when the post has appeared on your blog
5. Auto-selects whether to do an extended or normal ping
6. For extended pings, it uses the new URL instead of just the homepage URL to ping (resulting in a much higher quality ping)
It keeps a complete log of the last 100 actions so you know exactly when your site is sending out a ping.
Smart Update Pinger updates through a service called Pingomatic and you can add several other pinging services to this plugin.
My good friendJohn Engle recommends using just one Ping service with the plug-in when pinging your blog, and manually pinging through these other 5 sites.
As John will tell you, there may only be 4 sites listed, but keep in mind, Pingler alone pings up to 84 websites, and the others will ping anywhere from 20 to 50.
So you should be covered!
Here is John's list for Pinging Your Blog!
http://blogbuzzer.com/
http://www.pingler.com/
http://www.pingoat.com/
http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/
For some other simple SEO tips be sure tocheck out this article.
