Question:
“I have read many conflicting reports on the best sites to include in your wordpress settings to automatically ping when a post is released.
Do you have a resource on your site or one you know online that summarizes only the necessary yet the best ones to include in the settings?
I have also heard that including everything in here hurts as there are some duplicate ping activities that take place.”
~ Sunil, Extra Money Blog
In WordPress terms:
A ping is a “this site has new content” notification that invites search engine bots to visit your blog.
By default, WordPress pings one pinging service called Ping-o-matic; that service will in turn ping others.
How many services does YOUR blog currently ping?
How many should you ping?
Why is it important?
Too Much Pinging Can Cost Google Rankings
Back in the day when the more backlinks your website had, the better, we used to see mile-long lists if pinging services we just had to use.
Now that Google is pushing more and more towards quality of search results (as well as they should), “more” can be damaging.
Take a look at what Glen wrote in one of his ViperChill.com posts, after he had sent out a tweet concerning his lower than expected search engine rankings:
“I received a personal reply from Google’s head of web-spam, Matt (Cutts), who asked me if, when a blog posts goes live, I ping certain services…
Though I wasn’t pinging the services Matt asked me about, I was pinging a few with a foreign domain extension that he had mentioned and a lot of others, so I decided to remove all but a couple of them from my list.
A few days later and my rankings were back where they should be.
How crazy is it that some behind the scenes WordPress setting was costing me search rankings for my own brand name?”
Now that we know how important this is, we need to figure out the minimum number of ping services to use to achieve the maximum results.
My Ping Services List
After extensive research, here are my findings.
1. You can find a list of services WordPress suggests to use here.
It doesn’t have the time stamp, so I am not sure how current/relevant this list is.
2. Vladimir Prelovac (founder of ManageWP) has his own WordPress ping list.
According to WordPress, this list is manually checked and updated.
3. My top solution:
WordPress Compressed All-Inclusive Ping List
The late 2012 update to the list explains:
“Pingomatic has been growing, and they now ping more sites.
From reading their blog, it looks like they keep up well with technical changes required by the sites they ping.
Additionally, some services that have disabled their ping url’s now only seem to accept pings coming from pingomatic directly.
I deemed it therefore better from now on to use pingomatic with an additional list of ping services not supported by pingomatic.”
Makes complete sense.
Here’s the updated list (just copy and paste this list into Settings > Writing > Update Services) – this is the only list you need to use:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.myblog.jp
How to Avoid Being Pinged as a Spammer
By default, WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic on your blog.
That’s fine and that’s what we want.
But did you know that WordPress also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post?
If you edit a post 10 times, then WordPress will send 10 pings.
As a result, your blog might get banned from pinging services because of excessive pinging.
Here’s an easy fix: make sure you install this free MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin; it will correct the pinging problem without any work on your part.
Marketing Takeaway
You’ve got 30 seconds to update your ping list.
Go to Settings > Writing > Update Services.
Time starts now…
Off to update my own ping list,
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