Ping, ping and… ping again
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Pinging let search engines know you have something new on your website and invites them to crawl it. Pinging is the equivalent of the dinner bell for the search engines.
As for what and how you should ping, the main rules are the following:
- Everything that has an RSS feed needs pinging, cause this will assure faster indexing and ranking.
- Do not ping a website more than once a day, cause you could be banned from some ping website.
Self Hosted WordPress Blogs
Any blog has an RSS feed and you should ping it each time you publish a new post. WordPress has an automatic ping function built in, which comes with some small issues (actually, the issues were way bigger for the older versions of this platform).
You can set up a list of ping websites as long as you want in you blog settings. You can see the post I published about the list I use on this blog.
When you publish a post, WordPress sends out a ping to all these sites. The problem is that when you update the post it sends a new ping.
This can go against the second rule. You can overcome this problem by installing the Ping Optimizer plugin.
Blogspot Blogs and other Web Hosted Blogs
If you’re using web hosted blog platform, you can search for the rss feed in the address bar.
Articles
I already showed you how to find the RSS feed of your author page on Ezinearticles.com. You can do the same for any other article directory. Get this feed and ping it each time one of your articles gets published or once a day.
Squidoo
Each Squidoo lens has an RSS feed. The best thing to do is update the les and ping it right away. I suggest you to do this each time you add something new on the lens or at least once a week, even if you just go through the edit and publish process without modifying anything on it.
Press Releases
In a similar way, many press release websites give you a press room page you can find through your member account page. Get the RSS feed of this page and ping it.
Youtube and Video Sharing Websites
On most of video sharing websites give you a channel. Go to your channel page, get its RSS feed and ping it.
Social media websites.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Friendfeed… If you are enough active on your accounts, you could ping each one of these feeds once a day.
Podcast
If you publish a podcast, you have a feedburner RSS feed for it. Do I really need to tell you what you should do with it?
Advanced Blog Pinging Strategies
Some advanced strategies suggest to ping not only your blog main feed, but the category and tag feeds, too. Each time you publish a new post, ping your main feed and d the same for the category pages and the tag pages which have been interested by the post.
I know, this would take some time. You can try it for a few days and see the results you get.
Ping tools
Some of the best ping sites are pingoat.com, pingomatic.com, ipings.com.
I’m not sure if any of these submit your ping to the google blog search engine. You should do this separately.
The best tool I heard of is something which pings your feed to about 110 websites and, at the same time, to all the main RSS feed directories. I casually found it on this video, but I cannot assure you it will be alive forever.
