Embrace the power of pings
Written by Nico on December 4, 2008 – 4:51 am -Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.
If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.
This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)
Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.
There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!
Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
Other Posts you might like:
Tags: ping, Ping-o-Matic, rss, SEO, WordPress
Posted in Start Blogging, WordPress settings, Writing | 5 Comments »
December 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Definitely a must for all bloggers, however, be careful because every time you edit a post it pings again, this in turn sends out the post as if it is new, this can get you banned.
There is a plugin that will prevent this over at http://www.maxblogpress.com/
December 7th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I don’t think that one edit would do any harm, but its better to be careful! I didn’t know that another ping will be send when editing your post, I’ll check out that plugin.
December 29th, 2008 at 2:55 am
useful in case of blogging, also to update the site.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:36 am
There is no doubt that pinging is a useful service for informing the search engines about the new content on your blog; however, you should do pinging moderately, else it would do more harm to your website. So if you are updating your blog, with few posts every day, it is better not to have the pinging plugin, rather you should ping manually after a few posts.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
There is much in what you say. Too many pings in a short space of time could be detrimental. Best to update on later dates. Just tot be safe. Newshound (www.tintota.com)