Help with Lingo: Ping?! Index?!

Don't worry. We don't bit.

Well, most of us...

"Ping" simply means that your website notifies another website that it's been updated. Generally this is for blogs and other websites that have dynamic, changing content. Whenever you post a new post to your Wordpress blog, for example, it will automatically "ping" a number of websites for you to let them know that your site is updated with new content. These sites will then "spider" your site with a small piece of software on their server called a "bot." They may also, or instead, add your site's new post to their RSS feed to let their readers know about your new post.

You can see an example of a website that allows you to "ping" services that track new blog posts at Pingoat.com. This would allow you to submit manually--and choose which services are pinged, such as Technorati--but, like I said, if you're using Wordpress it will automatically ping those services each time you make a post.

Indexing usually refers to Google and other search engines adding your site to their search results. Google, for example, will send the Google bot to your site and the bot will crawl your site--following one link to the next--to index your site so that it shows up in Google.

Hope that helped.

Ping:
Ping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Update Services « WordPress Codex

Index (I assume you mean it in the context of "is your site indexed?"):
How many pages the search engine has crawled and indexed (made available for searchers to find)
Usage (in the search engine): site:warriorforum.com
Example: Google has indexed about 1,260,000 pages of warriorforum.com

Pinging is when you let google (& other search engines) know that you just did something and invite them to check it out!

Indexing is when it has been checked out. That is, google has visited it.

If you have a site, it is important to both have a good ping list (who you are pinging) and not to over ping.

You can ping things you did that are not on your site, like a new youtube video, an article etc.

Gather all those URLs and ping them. Pingfarm.com is a good site for this.

Pinging is when you let google (& other search engines) know that you just did something and invite them to check it out!

Indexing is when it has been checked out. That is, google has visited it.

If you have a site, it is important to both have a good ping list (who you are pinging) and not to over ping.

You can ping things you did that are not on your site, like a new youtube video, an article etc.

Gather all those URLs and ping them. Pingfarm.com is a good site for this.