What is pinging?

Pinging, at least this use of the word, is a way of telling search engines that you’ve written a new post, or you have made an update on your site or blog. A ping is a short data message sent to a ping server, telling it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is best described as a service on the internet that accepts messages in a specific format, called XML-RPC format. It takes the info from these XML-RPC messages, and uses it to publish lists of sites or blogs that have content that is new or just updated. These ping servers turn around and publish these lists to other ping servers or to search engines. Also, some ping servers have their own search engines.

How does pinging work?

WordPress, and many other blogging and site-building platforms have the pinging function built into them. Every time you make a post, a ping is sent out to one or more ping services. If your software doesn’t ping automatically, you can manually submit a link to most ping services. Normally, just go to their website and enter your url to ping.

The ping service that is defaulted in WordPress, is called Ping-O-Matic. When your site pings them, Ping-O-Matic in turn sends a notification to several other search engines and pinging services for you. So by pinging Ping-O-Matic, you ae in effect pinging several services. As of this writing, they ping 20 different services.

These ping services, or search engines, update their listings with new content immediately upon being pinged. Every time they are updated, you receive a backlink to your site. These are one-way links, and are therefore more valuable to search engines like Google, that place a high value on one-way links.

Here are some tips on pinging

- Only ping when you have new or changed content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted by that ping site for being spam. Spamming pings was a popular blackhat SEO method until the ping services started catching on and blocking it.

- Be careful to not ping the same service more than once. or example, if you ping Ping-O-Matic, don’t also ping the services that they turn around and ping. If you do this, they will catch your multiple ping and could label you as a spammer. If you have any doubt, check on the ping services site to see who they ping. It is better to ping less services than it is to duplicate your ping.

- Keep in mind that some site-builders, like WordPress, automatically ping every time you save a post that you are editing. (Although saving a post in draft status does not send a ping.) So if you are going to do multiple edits, you may want to do them off-site, then save them once on the site. Or, there is a plugin called post-schedule ping optimizer that you can use to prevent this.
- Some ping services are focused on specific niches. Do not abuse this. If you don’t fit their niche, it hurts them, and they may ban your ping.

What are the best ping services to ping today?

Here is the list I’ve been using lately:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

Good luck with your pinging!

David