Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Author Helps: Ping Your Blog Post

Author, Ping Your Blog Post


This is a revision of a post I made on a different blog several years ago. At the time, I was teaching computer information system classes. Now that I am working to build my authoring career, it seemed this information would be helpful to other authors, too. 

The basic information has not changed, but I have added context for authors trying to find new readers through their blogs. For purposes of this article, I am assuming you know little to nothing beyond using a browser and posting on your blog. This is not intended to insult anyone, but I want to make sure authors unused to technical aspects of the Internet understand.

Get Your Post Indexed by Search Engines


You might ask why you want your post indexed by search engines, such as Google. If the post is not indexed, it won't come up when someone searches a key phrase for your page. Eventually, search engines will find your post, anyway, but why not give them a boost and help them find it sooner?

What is a ping? Why should I ping my blog posts? This article will answer those questions and give you some pointers on how to go about it. Before readers can read your blog post, they need to be able to find it. While you may have some faithful, regular readers, everyone wants their blog to grow in readership. Like a single drop in a calm pool of water, a ping ripples throughout the Internet (figuratively speaking) and notifies search engines that your post exists.

What Does Ping Mean?


Ping, in the computer world, is a software utility program that allows users to determine if a site or connection is working. A message is sent to a site or connection, which results in a message back to the originating computer that the connection worked.

Pinging is one of the most important SEO basics that every blogger needs to know. What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization and simply means to use techniques, such as pinging, to help search engines find your posts.

In blogging, the definition of ping is a bit different. Blog pings send a message to a server, search engine, or another site to let them know there is something new to crawl. When you ping your site or your post, search engines send spiders (bots or programs that read and index the information on a site)  to crawl your site or page to index it.

Once the page is indexed, it is searchable through search engines. This will help others find your post since it will now come up in the natural (i.e. unpaid) search engine results.

Why Should You Ping Your Blog Post?


Again, pinging notifies search engines, directories, and other websites that your post exists or has been updated.

The coveted, but elusive natural traffic afforded by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines comes from being indexed by these sites. They can't index sites they don't know exist.

Will they find your post without pinging? Yes, eventually, but we all need traffic sooner than that.
Pinging reduces the time it takes to get your post indexed, therefore, it reduces the time it takes for your post to come up in natural search results when users search for your key phrase.

How Do You Ping Your Blog Post?


There are many web sites that provide this service for free.  To use most of them, navigate to the site, type in your post title, then type in (or copy and paste) the URL to your post. My favorite pinging site only requires the actual URL of the post and allows you to post multiple URLs at once, one per line.

Some services will require you to fill in a captcha textbox.  Many people consider captcha tools as annoyances, but they are important to separate human generated requests from machine or computer generated requests for pings.

This reduces the load on the service provider's server and makes it possible for you to use it.  Otherwise, it would be like getting a busy signal every time you try to call someone.

When Should a Blog Post be Pinged?


When you create a new post, you should ping the page. If you return to the post and make changes or improve the page, you should ping again. If you reference the post anywhere, ping the URL (the Internet address) of the reference.

Consider this example. When I post to my author's blog, I open a new NotePad window. I copy and paste the following URLs to NotePad, one URL to a line:

  • the URL of the actual post  (find this in the browser address bar)
  • the URL of the Home page of my site
  • the URL of each Facebook page where I post about the blog post (my personal Facebook page and my author page)
  • the URL of the Pinterest pin I make for the post. 
Next, I select and copy the list of URLs, open the pinging service site I use, and paste the list into the box. While there are others that are effective, I prefer to use PingFarm, because I always have multiple URLs to ping.

At PingFarm, you can ping a hundred or more sites at one time. Just paste a list into the box (make sure there is only one URL per line) or you can upload a text file (the file ends in .txt) list of URLs only. You won't need the blog title for this service.

Alternatively, you can paste individual URLs to the textbox, one to a line. If you post more than one URL to the line, the ping utility is confused. When all the links you want to ping are pasted or typed into the box, click Mass Ping, and you are done with all of them at once, which can save hours if you have lots of pages to ping. This is the reason I use PingFarm almost exclusively.

However, pings should only be done occasionally. If pings are done too often, you will first be warned, then possibly banned from the pinging site. Only ping your URL when you have made changes, such as added or updated content.

Some pinging services ping the same sites, directories, or search engines as other ping services do, so it is important not to use overlapping ping services. Choose one and stay with it.

Why? If you use http://www.pingler.com/, don't also use http://www.pingomatic.com/. These sites ping many of the same index sites and will cause issues for you.

How Soon will my Post be Indexed?


You might ask, "How soon will my post be indexed after it is pinged?"

Your post will be indexed after the search engines or directories send spiders to crawl your site. There is no way to determine exactly how long it will take, but if you wait until the spiders eventually crawl your site, it may take months.

Using Ping ensures that your post will be indexed as soon as possible. It could take as little time as twenty-four hours, or as much as a week or more. It depends entirely on the workload on the servers sending spiders to crawl your site. Pinging reduces the time required for indexing.

Recommended Ping Services


Ping services I have used:


There are others, but if you use too many or ping too often, you risk your efforts being considered spinging, or spam pinging. Again, choose one and use it, rather than using all of them.

If you want to know more about pinging services, a quick Google search on "ping services" will provide you with several sites that have comprehensive lists of these services.

Later,








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