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.