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Blog And Ping - What You Need To Know Before You Ping!

Written by kevinkoop on September 24th, 2009

If you’ve got a blog you likely know what “pinging” means but if you don’t, here is a real quick rundown of what pinging is and why you should care about it…

Pinging simply refers to sending an electronic notification from one site to another. In the case of blogs, you can “ping” a blog directory (like Technorati.com) and immediately notify them that you have just posted new content.

The result of this, is that the “ping sites” will send their spiders back to your blog for the sole purpose of indexing your new content. Some, will even give you a one-way link back to your new post (which is an added plus!).

However, before you go adding hundreds of ping sites to your list (inside of your WordPress Admin area) there are a couple of things you’ll want to know:

You can get blacklisted by the ping directories if you ping to often, especially if you ping the same content twice. This can also occur by mistake as WordPress will also ping whenever you edit or update a post. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been known to edit a post three or four times before being happy with it.

This can ping the directories multiple times (in a short time span and for the same post) and this doesn’t make them happy.

Another reason I don’t suggest you load your ping list with hundreds of ping directories is that it significantly slows down your posting process. Put another way, the more ping directories in your ping list, the longer you’ll wait before the post is published.

So, what’s the answer to these two issues?

[1] Consider using MaxBlogpress’ Ping Optimizer Plugin, found here: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/mpo-install/

The plugin is available for free (they refer to is as “Review Ware” which just means they’d like you to blog about it or tell others but that’s optional).

It will stop the directories from being pinged whenever you edit or update a post and it is also good for autoblogging as it will only ping on the date that the post has been “timestamped” for.

[2] Load up WordPress with just a handful of your favorite ping directories and then use a Free Ping Service, like the one found at: http://ping4free.com/ if you want to ping a bunch of them at once.

The thing I like about Ping4Free.com is, the owner, Lee Seats, does a great job keeping up with which ping sites are still active and which ones have dropped off the map. Ping sites come and go and I’d rather not have to research this myself everytime I wanted to ping a new post of mine.

Sure, it’s not automated like having is set up straight inside of WordPress but you can let someone else’s server do the heavy lifting and not have to wait 10 minutes before your post is published.

Lee’s service is free but you will need to register an account. In addition to the Free Ping Service he provides, he’ll also give you a quality short report on how to improve your Search Engine Rankings and even offers a creative way for members to buld one-way links (for free).