Monday, August 17, 2015

How and Why to Ping Your Blog Post

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Ping Your Post

Get Your Post Indexed by Search Engines


What is a ping? Why should I ping my blog posts? This article will answer those questions and give you some pointers on how to go about it. Before readers can read your blog post, they need to be able to find it. While you may have some faithful, regular readers, everyone wants their blog to grow in readership.

What Does Ping Mean?

Ping, in the computer world, is a software program that allows users to determine if a site or connection is working. A message is sent to the site or connection, which results in a message back to the originating computer that the connection worked. Pinging is one of the most important SEO basics  that every blogger needs to know. What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization, and simply means to use techniques, such as pinging, to help search engines find your posts.
In blogging, the definition of ping is a bit different. Blog pings send a message to a server, search engine, or other site to let them know there is something new to crawl. When you ping your site or your post, search engines send spiders to crawl your site or page to index it. Once the page is indexed, it is searchable through the search engines. This will help others find your post, since it will now come up in the natural (i.e. unpaid) search engine results.

Why Should You Ping Your Blog Post?

Again, pinging will notify search engines, directories, and other websites that your post exists or has been updated.
The coveted, but elusive natural traffic afforded by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines comes from being indexed by these sites. They can't index sites they do not know exist.
Will they find your post without pinging? Yes, eventually, but we all need traffic sooner than that.
Pinging reduces the time it takes to get your post indexed, therefore, it reduces the time it takes for your post to come up in natural search results when users search for your key phrase.

How Do You Ping Your Blog Post?

There are many web sites that provide this service for free.  To use them, navigate to the site, type in your post title, then type in (or copy and paste) the URL to your post.
Some services will require you to fill in a captcha textbox.  Many people consider captcha tools as annoyances, but they are important to separate human generated requests from machine or computer generated requests for pings. 
This is a good thing, since it reduces the load on the service provider's server, and makes it possible for you to use it.  Otherwise, it could be like getting a busy signal every time you try to call someone.

When Should a Blog Post be Pinged?

When  you create a new post, you should ping the page. If you return to the post and make changes or improve the page, you should ping again.
However, pings should only be done occasionally. If pings are done too often, you will first be warned, then possibly banned from the pinging site, if you continue.
Some pinging services ping the same sites, directories, or search engines as other ping services do, so it is important not to use overlapping ping services. For instance, if you use http://www.pingler.com/, don't also use http://www.pingomatic.com/. These sites ping many of the same places, and will cause issues for you.
A good pinging service to use when you have multiple sites or posts to ping is http://www.pingfarm.com/. You can ping a hundred or more sites at one time. You will need to have a list to paste in, or you can upload a txt file list of URLs only. You won't need the blog title for this service. Alternatively, you can paste individual URLs to the textbox, one to a line. Click Mass Ping, and you are done with all of them at once, which can save hours if you have lots of pages to ping. For this reason, I use PingFarm almost exclusively.

Recommended Ping Services

Ping services I have used:
There are others, but if you use too many or ping too often, you risk your efforts being considered spinging, or spam pinging. In fact, you should choose one and use it, rather than using all of them.

For those who want more pinging services, a quick Google search on "ping services" will provide you with several sites that have comprehensive lists of these services.









Do you ping your blog posts?



Please Comment Below

6 comments:

  1. Good info. I pinned to my Tips On Blogging board on Pinterest. Thanks.

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    1. You are welcome. I hope it helps. Thank you for the comment.

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  2. Never even heard of this...thanks for the info:)

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    Replies
    1. Pinging helps you get your article listed in Google and other search engines sooner. Thank you for commenting.

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