SEO – Does Pinging Mean Anything At All?
PPinger for WordPress has been released, and you can download it directly from the WordPress repository.
A visitor recently commented on a blog post referring to an old plugin of mine:
This sounds like a Great idea, but has it been shown to help anything?
The plugin he is referring to spreads out pinging the URL and RSS feed of your blog to Pingomatic.com.
Technical clarification: “Pinging” is, according to Wikipedia:
In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.
An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.
Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.
This WordPress plugin does not time it with the posting or updating of a blogpost/page, rather it uses a timer, and then triggers when a visitor comes by.
The plugin automatically randomizes between which of the 18 sub “Services” it requests Pingomatic.com to ping. Furthermore, the plugin makes the request from an iframe, which means the IP of the request will come from a visitors IP, not your servers IP as would be the norm.
For young, and not that “well-known” blogs, it will be a help in terms of getting noticed by the search engines and hence their indexation.
If you run a more “mature” blog, this plugin is not really necessary, the search engines know about you already, unless you really messed something up SEO-wise.
And just to be totally clear… If you ask me what I think this plugin is worth in terms of actual SEO value to your blog?
The answer is: Just about Zilch … Zero … 0 … Nothing. Nada!
But for new blogs, it can help you get started. The new plugin will be released shortly (free of course), so stay tuned.
PPinger for WordPress has been released, and you can download it directly from the WordPress repository.
What’s the new version do?
Keep up the good work!
Hi Luke
The current version is 2.3, and here is the changelog:
2.3
* WordPress 3.0 Compatible
* Backlinks can be turned on and off in settings.
* Dashboard Widget can now be turned on and off in the settings page
* Updated help/info page inside plugin.
2.2
* Log rotation
* Minor optimizations
Pinging is only good for newer blogs as you right put it. It helps direct serach bots to your site to crawl, but for older blogs, the search engines/bots already know you so it isn’t that necessary to alert them where you are…
Nicely put man. I don’t really see the essence of pinging a post if your blog is even about some few months old since the search bots might already know your blog.
Thank you! I have a new site and think your plugin will help me.
thanks answered my question!
gotta ping my new site
If I’m using PPinger, is it OK to delete all the URL’S in my ping list except maybe for http://rpc.pingomatic.com ?
Hi Glenn
I only use PPinger on some sites, the rest I only ping two services:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
Those are enough.
PPinger is excellent for new blogs, but for established websites above two will be sufficient.
I just started up a blog a week ago. I’ve noticed that it’s taken longer than my older site to index my pages, so I am going to give this “pinging” a try.
After all, it can’t possibly have a negative effect.
Hi I’ve been creating several blogs for my website but unfortunately they all contain the same content (Im now using spinnerchief)so was wondering what were the consequences of pinging a set of blogs that all have the same content? should i rewrite the content for each before pinging (which i intend to do in the next few months) or should i risk it and just submit my blogs to the ping services? many thanks
I agree…pinging only really helps with a new site. But it does seem like a lot of people are pitching it as something you should do all the time for SEO purposes. Are there any more opinions out there as to if this helps with internet marketing of your site?
I agree .. I think this type of service is a good tool for new blogs but isn’t usefull for SEO