Jan

Blog Pinging, What Is It, How and Why Should You Do It?

By suze

I haven’t posted in a while, I’ve been a busy, busy girl, but recently I’ve seen quite a few people in my travels around the interwebs asking about pinging, what is it, and how do you do it?

That really kinda surprised me, because I guess I just assumed everyone knows what pinging is. It’s sort of blogging 101, really, but since there are a lot of people who don’t know, I’m doing this post and a quick tutorial about pinging and what you need to do.

Ignore me talking to Daisy in the middle of the video..LOL

What is Pinging?

If you have a blog, or even a website, Hubpage or Squidoo lens, and you want to bring traffic to it so people actually see it and read all your awesome content, you have to have some sort of way to let the world know about it. You need the search engines to crawl it and index it, and you need as many people as possible shouting out to the world “Hey! Look, I’ve got some great stuff over here!” That’s what pinging is all about. There are blog directories, like Technorati, that will index your posts and services, like Pingomatic and Pingoat that will notify a few different sites, as well as Google and the other search engines that you have just posted something new to your blog so they will come crawl it and people will then be able to find it.

How does pinging happen?

WordPress, by default, comes with a link to pingomatic, a site that will ping many different directories and the search engines all at once every time you post. You don’t have to do anything to make this happen but hit the Publish button. The problem is, it will ping the service every time you hit the publish button, even if you’re just editing or updating a post, and over pinging is bad. Unfortunately, nobody is really sure how much pinging is too much. To stop WordPress from pinging too often, you should have a plugin installed on your blog called Cb net ping optimizer. It’s a free plugin that lets you control how often WordPress will send out a ping.

Huge List of Ping Services

While pinging Pingomatic is good, there are a lot more ping sites that you can add to your blog to optimize your pinging. Here’s a huge list of pinging services you can add, and if you watch the tutorial below, I will show you how to add them.

http://zing.zingfast.com

How To Ping A Website, Hubpage, or Squidoo Lens

Just like in your blog,if you have a regular static website that is not WordPress based, or maybe you write on Hubpages and have hubs you need to ping, or your Squidoo lenses. These things should be pinged as well whenever you add create a new one or add fresh content. Unfortunately, there is not way to automatically have that done for you, so you need to go directly to the ping service site and add your URL manually. For this, you should use a site like Pingdevice or Pingler. Personally, I prefer Pingdevice, because it lets you add more than one URL at a time and ping them all at once. If you have a long list of lenses you want to ping, it’s much easier to do it by adding them all at once.

So, that’s it. That’s all there is to pinging. Was this helpful?

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Blog Pinging, What Is It, How and Why Should You Do It?

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