When you write a post, you want the world to know really don’t you? It would be nice every time you posted, if you could somehow tell Google, Technorati, various other directories and your RSS feed readers that that your latest nugget of wisdom is ready to be received. Well, you can and it’s called pinging.
I won’t pretend to understand all of the technicalites, and won’t bore you with finding an explanation-you don’t need to know. But you have to use it.
In WordPress, go to ‘Options’, then ‘Writing’ and scroll down to Update Services. In this box you can enter a list of the most popular update services, & then each time you write a post, your blog ‘pings’ these sites, who then automatically update their records of your site with your latest material. For a list of popular ping services, check out my ‘Ping Services List‘ page. Simply cut & paste the list directly into your WordPress and click ‘Update Options’ You’re done.
Your RSS feeds also need to be updated – I can’t recommend FeedBurner enough & will feature them shortly, but if you use their service they will check your feed for new material every 30 minutes as well as giving you a button to update immediately.
If you can’t ping Technorati automatically, make sure you claim you’re blog (you must do this anyway) and then you can ping them manually by clicking on a button in your account. A blog I read (and will ask to contribute here) has published a dozen or so very good posts in the last month. His Technorati page has not been updated in nearly a month, and lists only 3 posts from him in total. I get a lot of traffic from Technorati searches – he is missing out.
If you’re not on WordPress, let me know how you can use ping services & I’ll publish your article here.
Questions? Please leave a comment. Corrections? Suggestions? Why not Contribute?
5 users commented in " Ping Is King "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHello, I guess if I am not the first reader of your new blog, then I am the first commenter of it! I think it is a great idea for the 3 Os:-) I hope I contribute a little bit:-)
Hey Sunflower, many thanks for visiting. I hope you find it interesting & I know you can contribute – You’ve changed your template design recently, how did you go about it?
chris – i work at feedburner…thanks for the nice comment!
one thing to let you know about pinging – if you ping feedburner, we’ll get the update immediately instead of every 30 minutes…and, we have a service called “pingshot” that pings all of the top blog search engines and rss aggregators…so, you can do all of your “pinging” just by using feedburner.
phew – can i use the word “ping” a few more times in that paragraph
thanks again…
don
Hey Don,
Many thanks for the extra info, much appreciated.
I love FeedBurner, it’s a truly excellent service. I can see that I have 8 subscribers already for Blog-Op & it’s not a week old yet!
[...] pings the major blog aggregator services like Bloglines, Google Reader etc. every time you post. Ping is King will tell you how to make sure you hit all the right services. Blogger uses will have to go manual [...]
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