To Ping My Blog or Not to Ping My Blog?

After spending a few months doing some reading and searching, I’ve put together a comprehensive list of ping URIs for blogs, specifically WordPress.  For those unaware, a ping in the blogosphere is an XML-RPC service that notifies services that a blog has been updated.  Mind you, that spammers have already found ways to abuse the system by excessively pinging services to drive traffic to their sites, which may not actually contain updated content, but rather links to products or ads.  Such activity is not condoned nor do search engines tolerate excessive spam pinging (your site could get banned from some search engines).  On the other hand, effective and legitimate pinging does aid in search rankings and search engine optimization because if search engines are pinged when new content is made readily available, the faster search engines can crawl and index the fresh content.

For a few other articles on pinging and SEO, check out

• Why Ping is Necessary
• Blog and Ping
• Blog and Ping the Right Way

For those that use WordPress like I do and worry that your site could yield a false positive for ping spam, there’s an awesome plugin out there called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer which will limit excessive pinging that can occur when a blog post is updated or modified.  The plugin only pings services when new content has been published.  Users can also limit the minimum pinging duration for added security.  The best part of the plugin is that it’s free, but you do have to provide your email address in order to download and use the plugin.