What Is Blog Pinging and Why You Need It

So you’ve added a new post to your blog, but who will know? There are numerous blog aggregators out on the web that will display your headline in their blog news summary list, but only if they know you exist.

The solution, ‘pinging’ a multitude of servers to let them know that your site has been updated. To quote Wikipedia, Blog pinging is the process of sending an XML-RPC signal to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.

There are 3 ways to go about getting your blog pinged:

The first way is to add code to your site to automatically send info to ping servers each time you update. This is the most complicated way to set up, but the easiest overall as it is virtually maintenance-free once implemented.

The second is to go to each aggregator and manually ping your blog. This way is incredibly time consuming and not recommended as there are many, many ping servers on which want to promote your blog if looking for mass exposure.

The third is to use a semi-automated pinging tool like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat. With these tools, you have to manually visit the site each time you update, but the tool will ping many blog resources with the push of a single button.

A word to the wise: Don’t just assume that if you submitted your information to a tool like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat that your blog has been pinged. Some sites like Syndic8 and COREBlog require a one-time manual submission on the site before you can use an external pinging tool.

In the beginning, you may want to follow up on all of the aggragator sites to which your ping tool is supposed to be sending information to ensure it is arriving. Robin Good has a nice post about his own experience and experiment with using pinging tools and their effectiveness that is worth reading before getting started.

Happy pinging!