What Is Pinging And Why Is It Important?

What Is Pinging?

Pinging is a way for websites to let search engines, feed aggregators, and social networks know that your website or blog has been updated.

Why Is Pinging Important?

When you ping your new content, you will get more TRAFFIC.

Announcing “new content” to the update services increases the speed with which search engines find and index your content. For example, if you have a small site, a Search Engine may schedule itself to visit and search for new content once every two-weeks. A Ping instantly announces your new content.

A few years ago, pinging was a hot topic. Dozens of pinging and aggregator services popped up almost every week. Some webmasters had lists of 60 or more services they subscribed and pinged to.

Today you rarely hear about pinging. One of the reasons is that WordPress has a default setting that takes care of the pinging for you. WordPress only lists ONE pinging service – Ping-O-Matic, because that is all you need. Ping-O-Matic sends your ping to all the important updating services.

Getting Banned is a Potential Problem

If you write your blog pages or posts in Word or Scrivener and simply copy/paste your final version into your blog, you may not HAVE a problem. But IF you are like me, first you publish your post and then you edit it . . . and tweek it . . . and rework your layout . . . tweek againa . . . and rework your headers, a dozen times or more!

Editing and updating a post several time within a short period of time sends a ping EACH time. Too many pings and your site will be banned from the update services because you are “spamming” them.

There are two solutions to this problem:

turn off the pinging service (and lose potential traffic) OR
install a plugin that will prevent multiple pings.

Ping Plugins

Here are two popular Ping Plugins. Both of them are easy to install and configure. You only have to do this ONCE and can then forget about it forever.

Best WordPress Ping Optimizer Plugin

Features:

Ping-O-Matic is only pinged when a new post is created. You can edit as many times as necessary … your ping will only go out once.
If you schedule posts for the future, the ping goes out when the post is published.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

You have to download this plug-in directly from the MaxBlogPress website. You also have to register your email address, which has many people up-in-arms because of potential spamming. Though some people seem to have an issue with this, I have been using this plug-in on multiple sites for over seven years with no spamming problems.

Features:

Ping-O-Matic is only pinged when a new post is created. You can edit as many times as necessary … your ping will only go out once.
If you schedule posts for the future, the ping goes out when the post is published.
Logging details available.
‘Ping Now’ button.

One of my customers asked, “Is this REALLY necessary?” He pointed out that WordPress says, “When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services.” This statement implies the ping only goes out once with a new blog post.

However, if you go to the WordPress Codex, it states: “WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.”

So my answer is YES … if you are a “serial editor” a plugin is necessary!