(7) comments
Add Your Reply
Menu
If ping servers are a foreign concept to you, you probably won’t appreciate this list of ping servers. And since I value *appreciation*, let me explain exactly why you should care about ping services — first.
And no geeky-technical-only-your-IT-manager-will-understand-it jargon.
The term *ping* dates all the way back to the early days of computer networks – which pre-dates the Internet. It was a service on the computer that would allow network administrators to check to see if a connection was present.
Sort of like a bat sending out sonic sound waves, a computer would *ping* another, and record the time it took to *hear* the return message. If it heard it at all, the network admin’s knew the network connection was *live*.
And while the *ping* tool is still available today to check for connections to other computers, with the introduction of blogs, the ping server was born.
Basically, the ping service is a tap on the shoulder of the service provider and search engines. It quietly says “Hey, Cenay posted a new article, come see”. And since many ping servers also talk to Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, this is like telling Google… “Hey, come crawl my site and see my new content”.
Since a *crawl* is the only way to get your pages listed in their index, you really want the search engines to show up as often as you post.
WordPress contains a built in feature to allow you to do just that!
On the Dashboard | Settings | Writing tab of your WordPress blog is a box called *Update Services* where you can list ping servers you want to notify every time you add a new blog post.
When you first create your blog, there is one ping server listed by default. You can add to this list, one URL per line. To fast track your notifications to the search engines, add more ping services from the list below.
WordPress, by default, will ping the services every time you add a post, or update a post. This means that if you edit your posts more than once, you are pinging the services each time you edit. This can lead to *ping spamming*, and getting your blog banned.
There is a way around this.
I highly recommend a Ping Optimizer which will selectively ping based on when the last ping happened. MaxPressBlog’s Ping Optimizer will allow you to set a “throttle” on the number of times it will ping in a given time frame.
This will ensure you can happily blog like crazy, update your posts to your heart content and NOT get your blog banned from the ping servers.
Select 8 to 10 of the services listed above and add them to your blog’s Dashboard | Settings | Writing page. Save the changes.
Install MaxPressBlog’s Ping Optimizer and set the “optimizer” to ping no more than once every 120 minutes (or more).
If you find a ping server I didn’t list, let me know. Find one that no longer works? Let me know as well. Just drop a comment below!
