What Are The Blog Ping Services And Why Should I Use Them?

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What Are The Blog Ping Services And Why Should I Use Them?

14 April 2009 11,804 views 6 Comments

If blogging is all new to you, you may or may not have heard of the many blog ping service websites yet. Either way this post should explain to you all you need to know about them as well as why and how you should use them.

What is pinging all about?

Basically when your blog pings pinging services it’s notifying them of new content on your blog. After receiving the ping these sites normally list your site somewhere on theirs and as a lot of these sites are pretty big and well link to from other sites, the Google search engine generally visits them often and finds the links back your site, follows them and indexes your new pages.

Why should I use them?

I wasn’t blogging around the time these sites first came out, so I can’t comment, but It is said by many that the links you could get from these services helped your Google rankings quite a bit in the beginning, however they very quickly got over used by spammers and alike and so these days the links back to your site carry little value, i.e. they are very weak votes for your site in the eyes of Google.

Never the less, it’s still worth pinging Blog Ping Services as they do still help to get you indexed in Google fast. I’ve often started a new blog and found it index in Google within days before I’ve even started to promote it in any other way! Plus the fact it’s totally automated by your wordpress blog, so there’s nothing for you to do once you’ve set up your list of services.

How do I set up automatic pinging in my WordPress blog?

If you are using WordPress for your blogging you will find in your admin under settings/writing that at the bottom of the page you have a box which you can use to input the URLs of different blog ping services. Once you have done this your blog will automatically ping these services every time you post content. You can find my Working List Of Blog Ping Service URLs In This Post.

Taking full control of my WordPress blogs pinging

There are various plugins for WordPress you can use to enhance your blogs pinging functionalities and ultimately give you more control. The two that I have used are MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer and Smart Update Pinger, the latter has not been updated since 2006 and is very basic so I use maxblogpress ping optimizer which has a lot of great features, in fact it is one of my favorite plugins on my Top WordPress Blog Plugins List.

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76 Comments2009-04-14+02%3A00%3A29Jayen »

Josh said:

"You can find my working list of blog ping service URLs in this post." Where? I don't see them. I have a short list that I use, I'm not sure where I collected them from but it seems useful enough that whenever I create a new blog for another site or person I copy and paste them. The only useful one seems to be google. That might be because of my useless content…

# 19 May 2009 at 1:38 pm

Jayen (author) said:

Opps, sorry about that it was supposed to be a link. I’ve now made it a link to the post, thanks for alerting me to it.

Google’s is naturally one of the most important, but there’s no reason why not to post to the others that still work, remember thou this mostly just to get your pages indexed (twitter is also good for this). You need to be focusing your articles on keywords people are searching for and that are not too competitive to rank for, plus you need to get links into your pages using variations of your keywords from other sites so as to provide social proof to the search engines that you’re pages are worth while for the keywords you’re focusing on.

# 27 May 2009 at 5:54 pm

chris marx said:

The best part about this was why I should use a pinging service for my blog.
It sounds like I don't really need to do it if my blog is already established and regularly getting crawled by search bots?

Also whats the point of the plug-ins? what extra functionality do they add?
Thanks!

# 24 June 2009 at 6:29 am

Jayen (author) said:

Well as i said it only takes a few minutes to set up, so I’d definitely do it, the more promotion the better

As for the plugins, if you click the link on the linked plugin on this page your see i’ve written a little about it, but the main added function is a log of when your blog has pinged and whether they were successful. This can be very useful at 1st to see whether or not all of your ping service URLs are still active or not.

Jayen

# 29 June 2009 at 2:46 pm

Max said:

Good day! While this information may be a little dated, I've found that Smart Update Pinger is no longer updated for use with wordpress 2.1 and above.

Check out this article for more information about this:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/blog/211/important-me...

You can use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer as a replacement for the Smart Update Pinger

# 13 July 2009 at 6:04 am

Jayen (author) said:

Yeah, like i said it hasn’t been updated since 2006 and your plugin is far superior anyway.

# 31 July 2009 at 3:40 am