Pinging Question?

To make it very simple, Pinging just lets the search engines know you have new content to be indexed on the search engine listings. It's like sending out a Bat signal if you ever watched Batman.

After you ping the search engines they send out bot crawlers or spiders that scan your site for new content. Once they identify the new content then they place your content somewhere along their search index. A lot of factors come into play with where your content falls in the search listings ( page rank, site authority etc).

If you are using a self hosted Wordpress blog this is actually done automatically however it only pings one or two services. You can find this by going into your control panel->settings->Writing--> scroll down to where it says updated services. Those are the url your blog will ping everytime you publish a post.

You can do this manually also by using sites like PingGoat, Pingler, and ping o matic. There are a few out there. I personally use Pingler because it has a social media component if you have an account setup with them.

You do have to use caution that you don't ping the same content multiple times because it is like spamming the search engines. For example if you published a blog post and pinged it that is fine. However if you had to go back to that blog post and make updates or changes to it within 24-72 hrs, pinging it during that time is not suggested.

Last there are some ping plugins that you can use to help you automate all of this. You have to do some research to find out the sites they ping to and if there is a cost involved to use them.

Hope this helps you out.

@Traffic_is_King:
Thanks for explaining. I realized that I did not know enough about pinging.

Is it true that Wordpress also pings if you safe a draft?

(That is something I heard and I am concerned about...)

Pinging just flags your new content to the search engines to be crawled and indexed.
Over pinging can get you into trouble so use a plugin like

WordPress › cbnet Ping Optimizer « WordPress Plugins

This will ensure you only ping new posts and not draft/edits.

Also add Pingoat and Pingomatic to your ping list which will probably be sufficient as these will mass ping your blog for you.


Let it all happen automatically. No need for manual pings and no need to worry too much abut it at all. Set it and forget it.

If you are posting regular,quality, intresting content then the seach engines will come back to your site reqularly anyway.