Ping without the Pong - How to ping your blog to the top

When you publish one of your posts your blogging software should notify some ping services that you have added more content to your blog. There are numerous pinging services on the web.

Basically pinging works like this :

1. You publish a new post on your blog
2. Your blog notifies one or more pinging services
3. the pinging service then lets blog search engines know that there is new content on your blog

By default, Wordpress only uses one service to ping your site. Namely Pingomatic. You can see the address http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the blog admin area under options, writing, Update Services. You can add more pinging services in this box.

Pingomatic updates your blog with the following sites : WebLogs, Blo.gs, Technorati, Feed Burner, Syndic8, NewsGator, Feedster, My Yahoo!, PubSub.com, Blogdigger, BlogRolling, BlogStreet, Moreover, Weblogalot, Icerocket, News Is Free and Topic Exchange.

The wordpress update services info page suggests using these services as well. This list seems old so you might have to remove some sites which come back as errors.

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php


What Ping Services do you recommend?

Feedburner have a fantastic feature in the publicize section called pingshot.

Feedburner automatically pings Technorati, My Yahoo, Bloglines, Pingomatic and Newsgator for you. However, you have the option of adding 5 more pinging services as well. It’s a fantastic feature and is another reason why you should be using Feedburner

The other services which i like are :

• Pingates
• Pingomatic
• Pingoat

You can also find a good list here.

Pinging to Success

I’m not sure if there’s any real harm in pinging after every post (from a spam point of view) but i tend to just do a ping every few days to let the ping services that don’t automatically crawl my blog to do a catch up. If you have a user online plugin you will see it shoot up very quickly with all the bots indexing your new pages.

You really don’t have to spend too much time pinging but it is something that you should be aware of. If there are any other ping services you know about please let me know

Good Luck,
Kevin