Pinging your Articles to Search Engines: What you should Know

With millions of competing websites and articles available on the Internet, it is important to have your online articles indexed as soon as possible for your online readers to find you. Getting traffic to your online writing is the most important consideration when writing online. Large websites for community writers such as HubPages and Squidoo are indexed quite fast on Google, and many writers therefore do not find it necessary to ping their articles.

But what is pinging? Pinging is considered an Internet marketing tool which informs search engines about the existence of your articles and then indexes them faster. Various ping sites exist for the different search engines or you can also simply use Google's Webmaster Tools.

In this article I would like to explain why it is beneficial to ping your articles but also why it is important not to overdo it.

Numerous free ping services are available. The more popular free ping services are pingomatic, feedshark, pingfarm and pingler. You do not need to register and your articles will be pinged within minutes after submitting the URL. Squidoo, for example, has its own ping service on the Squidutils website where new articles can be pinged by community members.

It is important to remember that you should ping your articles when they are new and not pinged before. Thereafter you need to only ping your articles when you made a major update. This is in my view important, otherwise search engines will find the old articles in the search results instead. Pinging updated articles will inform search engines that new content is available and your updated articles will be indexed accordingly. However, never overdo the pinging as your IP address can eventually be blocked as it could be considered spamming by the search engines.

The big search engines Bing, Google and Yahoo have their own ping services which I prefer to use instead of the free ping services. Google indexes my articles the fastest, but although it takes a bit longer, those articles which I pinged are eventually also indexed by Bing and Yahoo. I find it beneficial for traffic to my articles not to only ping to Google, although this is by far the dominant search engine.

Writers should not underestimate the benefits of pinging their articles although many might disagree with my approach. To market your articles online requires much effort and is also time consuming. Pinging my articles is one of my strategies to become more visible and to be found on the Internet and I never consider it as a waste of my time.