What does pinging mean?

[Keep Trying]

I've heard that you shouldn't ping your website, but that you should ping the back links to your website. What does pinging mean? How would I ping a back link from something like a blog comment?

[John Williamson]

Pinging is just letting the search engine spiders know that they should come crawl a certain page.

[bigcat1967]

I use pingomatic and/or pingler

[AMiRU]

Pinging is informing the search engines, "hey, check out my website!"

I think pinging both your website and your backlink is cool.

I use pingdevice to ping my backlink, not for my website as I'm running on Wordpress. WP has a build in function to ping search engines.

[Keep Trying]

Thank you everyone.

[yukon]

Wordpress will ping pingomatic by default, anytime you post a new wp-post. If your running WP.

[zach1988]

Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test the reach ability of a host

[shantipropertie]

Originally Posted by Keep Trying

I've heard that you shouldn't ping your website, but that you should ping the back links to your website. What does pinging mean? How would I ping a back link from something like a blog comment?

This means that you make a Google bot to crawl and index your Website content in its database. So that when people search for content that your Website has then your blog is displayed on Google SERPS (search results pages).

[android45]

Ping means your are telling search engine that your have update some thing on your website. Try Pingomatic.com this will help you ping your backlinks.

[warrich]

Pinging is letting the Search Engine know of your site that they can come and crawl your site. You should do it especially after adding new content or any other updation as the change will be quick to get noticed and will then appear in the SERPs.

[trishseo]

Originally Posted by Keep Trying

I've heard that you shouldn't ping your website, but that you should ping the back links to your website. What does pinging mean? How would I ping a back link from something like a blog comment?

My business partner wrote this originally so full credit to him. This is for those looking understanding what is pinging and/or indexing.

"Pinging - alerts search engines of a change to a URL. In a practical sense, we use it to let search engines that profile links (or other new pages) even exist. This is important because many profiles have no links internal or external to let Google even know that those pages exist. They can crawl the forum and still have no way of knowing you have a profile on it because there isn't even a member list or link anywhere to your name. Pinging doesn't guarantee your page will get crawled and indexed but it increases the chances. There is nothing worse than building links and then having Google never find them and/or index them. You can have a link that has been crawled and counted in your ranking but the page and the backlink is not indexed.

Indexing - means a search engine is showing that the page has been stored in their index and therefore will show in search results. You can try by just searching the URL directly. In a practical sense, it's more important because search engines give greater weight to indexed links. Non-indexed pages (like profile pages with no links) are often deemed not important enough to fetch any search results. Thus, it is our goal to get most of our backlinks indexed. You can never get 100% but the more the better. That doesn't mean that a site cannot rank if links aren't indexed as they can still be crawled and counted as a link but not indexed. However, your chances of ranking highly increases dozens of times if your links are indexed. Typically, most SEO people use Yahoo Site Explorer to check indexed links since Google only shows a very small portion of a site's links thus preventing people from reverse engineering their algorithm. Yahoo is more open and shares a higher percentage of their indexed links though still never all of them.

So when you use those programs, for example SEnuke X, the pinging application alerts search engines that a new URL exists and the indexer (SEnuke actually uses a third party service that costs money which is why there is a daily limit) to build backlinks to your backlinks so that they are given higher credit in search engines. Pages that have their own links pointing to them are more likely to be indexed. The end goal is obviously to build a high number of links to your site and also simultaneously receive increased search engine positions."

Basically to add to that, pinging tells a search engine it's there indirectly through alerting blog networks of a change to a URL.