Pinging blogs and sites
A look at your audience
If you’re a blogger, be it for fun or for business/profit reasons, you’ll want to get your message out to as many people as possible. This is fairly straightforward if people follow your blog since they’ll receive a notification from you whenever you publish a new blog post. However, what happens if you want to get your new post out to a wider audience that doesn’t have a subscription (such as an email update or RSS feed) to your blog?
You’d be relying on someone stumbling upon your blog by chance and then again finding your latest post by chance as well. If the particular blog post is one that you feel is highly important and could be extremely profitable to you, then without getting the message out to as many people as possible then it could result in a loss of profit since your reader base is greatly reduced.
Pinging services and what they do
However, one of the best ways to get around this situation is to use a website pinging service. What this entails is basically telling the search engines that you have made a fresh post on your blog. These pinging sites are extremely easy to use, and two such great examples are a single Google Ping URL and also a Bulk Ping URL.
When it comes time to pinging them, it’s very easy. All you need to do is load up the site, and insert your blogs name as well as the URL you’ll be pinging for the post. It’s best that you only ping the one post at a time, rather than doing the whole blog. As an example of this, whilst HubPages isn’t strictly a blog, you’ll notice that the URL of each Hub of mine starts with solvemymaze.hubpages.com/ after which the Hub title will be present. Now, imagine that if I had to ping my home page every time I posted a new Hub, rather than just the new Hub itself. It would confuse Google and make it think that brand new content had been created across all of my Hubs, even though it hasn’t.
It’s been speculated that this practice in the past has been deemed as a way to get ahead in the search rankings for your chosen keyword, and therefore it could be deemed as a blackhat method. As a result of this, you should only ping your latest blog post. By doing so, it’ll help your post appear in the search engines for its chosen keywords.
A word of caution
However, whilst you should never ping a whole blog, the same is true for whole sites. Pinging can be used on websites as well as a way to help have your page indexed. I.e. your local doctors website makes some amendments to the work it carries out and therefore creates a new page on it.
Because the URL structure of a new webpage is identical to a new blog post, it’s extremely encouraged that when you make a new page on your site that you ping it, especially if you don’t have a function in your website to update the sitemap. The benefit of pinging it is that it saves you from having to manually submit the pages to the wide variety of website search engines which can actually be extremely time consuming. In effect, it’s a quick way of indexing it, or getting any fresh links on the page indexed so they’ll act as a backlink back to the site in question.
As mentioned above though, it’s highly recommended that you only submit any new blog post/page to a pinging service rather than the whole site. With the ever changing algorithms by Google and with them constantly changing the goal posts, it could have a negative impact on your site.
In the long run, it just isn’t worth the hassle that your site faces a penalty and the page is de-indexed. Having said that, when used properly, pinging is an acceptable and safe way to make sure your website is given the full and fair exposure that it deserves in the search engines.
