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When you own a blog and are pinging you are using a method of alerting the search engines that you have created brand new content for your blog or that you have updated a blog post that you had previously written. When you send a ping you are basically sending a message to a ping server, which then alerts the search engines that your blog now contains new information.
Now what is a ping server?
Ping servers are web-based applications that accept messages (or “pings”) in an XML-RPC format. The ping server will then take the information it receives from these messages to create a list of all the blogs the have recently been updated with freash information. There are many blog servers that operate their own search engines for blogs while there are others that take the information that they receive through the XML-RPC messages that they receive to update other ping servers and search engines.
Ok now that you know what pinging is and how a ping server operates how does pinging work?
A great many bloging platforms operate with a built in pinging tool. WordPress for example is one of these blogging platforms and has the option to ping turned on by default. When a WordPress blogger creates new content for their blog their ping will go out instantly to one ping server, which then in turn updates several different search engines.
If you are unsure if your blogging platform allows you to utilize pinging you can manually send messages to ping servers buy visiting their main websites and adding your blog’s name and url.
PingOMatic is an incredibly helpful blog ping server. By notifying the PingOMatic server that you have added new content to your blog. Once PingOMatic gets this information it will be able to notify several different websites that your blog has fresh content. The bonus here is that many of these search engines have their own independent ping server, which will bring even more attention to your blog.
There are many search engines that have the ability to almost instantly update their listings as soon as they are made aware of new content. This is exactly what you want to happen as you will then be given one way backlinks from your blog to the search engines. Many of the search engine pages that you could find yourself listed on could have a very high PageRank with Google.
Four important rules of pinging.
You should only ping you blog if you have just added fresh content to it. If you choose to not follow this rule you will quickly find that your blog will quickly gain the reputation of a spam blog, which is commonly referred to as a splog.
You follow the practice of creating new content for your blog and then rewriting that new post often it would be a good practice to only ping when you add fresh content to your blog.
It is a great idea to ping several different ping servers when you add new content to your blog. Just make sure that you do not go overboard and that you make sure if you are going to ping a niche search engine that your blog is relevant to the search engine.
