I bet you’ve landed on this page searching for answers about WordPress pings, possibly (secretly?) hoping it just might be the golden ticket to your blog being discovered and loved by the world…
Well, maybe not quite so dramatic, but nonetheless…
Let me ask you this: have you noticed yet how hard it is to find any current information about WordPress pings?
And the information that IS out there… might actually put all kinds of wrong ideas into that pretty head of yours!
It might even tell you that if you use a lengthy list of ping services, your blog will get TRAFFIC. Tons of it, no doubt.
<a moment of silence>
Really? Traffic falling from Heavens like manna?…
<I bet you already know where I am going with this>
If getting website traffic was as easy as a ping, Traffic Generation Café wouldn’t be here. Yet here I am, still blogging about traffic since 2011…
So let’s cut through the hogwash and find out:
- what is a ping?
- what does it do?
- how many services do you really need to ping?
- how does it affect your SEO (if at all)?
NOTE (and a disclosure of sorts)
I really believe that pinging is NOT anything you should concern yourself with. It’s just non-essential to your online presence.
There are better, more productive, AND traffic-driving ways to let the search engines know you’ve got fresh content.
So forgive me for treating the subject with a bit of impatience.
However, since you, my dear Reader, are searching for answers, I’ll do my best to give them to you. 😉
What is a ping?
A “ping” is actually a term that relates to a test to find out how fast a data signal can travel from one place to another.
A ping sends a “packet” of electronic data to a specific IP address and “waits” for an electronic signal/tone that’s known as a “pong.” (source)
And no, no relationship to ping pong…
By the way, the word ‘ping’ came from the sound that a submarine’s sonar makes when it bounces off physical objects underwater.
What Is a WordPress Ping?
In WordPress terms:
A ping is a “this site has new content” notification that invites search engine bots to visit your blog.
Within the WordPress interface, “ping” could also be used to refer to Pingbacks and Trackbacks.
When you ‘ping’ a blog post, what you are really hoping for is:
- to notify sites that display blogrolls that you’ve got new content to be displayed in those blogrolls for the world to see and bring you traffic. (A-HA!… that’s where the whole ‘traffic’ part comes from!)
- to notify blog indexing sites (like Technorati) that you’ve got new content so that they could list it… somewhere… on their site and bring you traffic. (more traffic!)
- to notify search engines (let’s face it, you mean ‘Google’) that you have new content to crawl, index, and list in their search engine page results (SERPs).
Let’s take that apart for a moment…
Blogrolls drive traffic?
Here’s an excerpt from the WordPress Codex page about pings:
Blogrolling scripts like blogrolling.com and WordPress check update services to see if you’ve updated and then shows it on everyone’s site — usually by moving you to the top of people’s blogrolling list or putting a recently updated indicator by your link.
Problem is… blogrolling.com no longer exists and… when was the last time you saw a blogroll displayed on anyone’s site?
(By the way, if you HAVE recently seen one of those, send them the link to this post and tell them to get rid of the dang thing!)
So, blogrolls as a reason to ping your blog is out and, sadly, website traffic from blogrolls is out too.
Sites that index other sites drive traffic?
The biggest and most famous one of those would be Technorati.
Everyone knows Technorati, right?
Even that official WordPress Codex page mentions Technorati as one of the services they ping… (just goes to show how outdated that page is!)
Trouble is… Technorati is not longer the Technorati it used to be. It’s now Technorati the advertising platform.
After a half-decade of helping blogs and self-published websites gain exposure, Technorati took the natural step of helping those same types of websites earn revenue through an advertising platform launched in 2008.
Are there any other blog indexing sites that still exist?
Yes. Alltop comes to mind.
Alltop is a good example of a blog indexing site: a bunch of links from various blogs on various topics.
Out of curiosity (and nerdiness, of course!), let’s take a look at Alltop traffic sources using SEMrush.com, my hands-down favorite SEO and marketing intelligence tool.
You can see the page for yourself here.
Wow, look at how sharply Alltop traffic has dropped since last month; they’ve managed to lose nearly half of it! Hit by Google Penguin? It’s a possibility…
On the other hand, always seems like Alltop promotion lays squarely on the shoulders of ONE person – Guy Kawasaki, Alltop co-founder, as well as the creator of Canva.
Looks like Guy is running out of steam…
Anyhoo… I digress.
Just trust me on this one – you won’t be getting any traffic from blog indexing websites.
That boat has sailed like a decade ago.
What to do to ACTUALLY drive traffic to your site?
…besides reading Traffic Generation Café, that is? 😉
Reading and DOING what you read about at Traffic Generation Café.
Like Kurt Frankenberg did and, as a result, increased his traffic 89% in 28 days.
Here are some good reads to start (or continue) mastering your traffic generation:
- How to Increase Website Traffic One Perfect Bite at a Time
- Social Media Traffic 101: How to REALLY Get Traffic from Social Media
- Increase Website Traffic: The Ultimate Blueprint to More Profitable Web Traffic
- Promote Your Blog: 10 Steps to Ultimate Blog Promotion [My Personal Cheat Sheet]
And some shorter, more bite-sized Traffic Hacks:
- How to Turn a Blog Post into a Video in 5 Minutes [Traffic Hack]
- Be Everywhere: How to Convert a Blog Post into PDF in Under 60 Seconds
- How to Get Links and Traffic from Flickr [#TrafficHack]
Could pinging possibly help with search engine rankings?
Um… NO.
Could pinging help the search engine bots discover your content? A-ha… now we are on the right track.
What we are really talking about here is crawling and indexing.
You can learn more about how Google works here, but let me briefly tell you what Googlebot is and the difference between indexing and crawling.
Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (sometimes called a “spider”).
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
Indexing is the processing of the information gathered by Googlebot during crawling. The pages are then added to Google’s searchable index.
Thus pinging you new or freshly updated content could, in fact, invite Googlebot to crawl it.
However, pinging is far not the most effective way to get Google to crawl and index your site.
Here’s what I’d rather see you do.
1. Add a sitemap
A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content.
Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
Do you have to have a sitemap?
According to Google, not really.
However:
If your site’s pages are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site.
Can’t help but mention Casey Henry’s experiment in which he set to find out whether a sitemap can boost search rankings.
The results blew him away.
When he installed the Google XML sitemaps generator (a free WP plugin) on a client’s website, it took an average of 14 minutes for Google to index new pages.
That was way, way, waaaaaay down from 1,375 minutes it took before he installed the sitemaps generator!
Creating a sitemap is easy. You just let a plugin do all the creating.
Use either Google XML sitemaps generator or, if you have Yoast SEO already installed on your site (or thinking of installing it), use its built in sitemap functionality.
2. Share your post on social media
It’s simple: Googlebot discovers sites by following links from page to page.
When you share your content on bot-infested social media, the bots will follow your link from that page (your social media share) to your blog post page.
Needless to say, unlike traffic from blogrolls or blog index sites, social media traffic does exist!
3. May or may not help, but good to do anyway
Make sure you install Google Analytics tracking code on your site, as well as claim it in Google Search Console.
Also, contrary to many blog posts I’ve read, I don’t believe that using Fetch as Google function in Google Search Console will get Googlebot to crawl/index your site faster.
It’s meant to test if Google can crawl your web page, how it renders the page, and whether any page resources (such as images or scripts) are blocked to Googlebot, and is useful for debugging crawl issues on your site.
My WordPress Ping Services List
Back to the world of ‘to ping or not to ping.’
By default, WordPress pings one service called Ping-o-matic; that service will in turn ping others.
Why Ping-o-matic?
Because it’s owned and run by the WordPress Foundation, a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and current CEO of Automattic.
I’d say Matt knows what he’s doing when it comes down to WordPress… wouldn’t you?
Boom! There you go. Done.
I officially declare that Ping-O-Matic is the only update service your blog needs.
All you need to do is to go to Settings > Writing > Update Services to make sure http://rpc.pingomatic.com is the only update service listed there.
And just in case you still insist on holding onto that huge list of update services of yours (or more like another blogger’s list you’ve copied, trusting them to know what they are doing… really?), read on.
Too Much Pinging Could Cost Google Rankings?
Back in the day when a crappy backlink seem to be better than no backlink at all, we had mile-long lists of update services we just had to ping.
These days, that (let’s face it) shady tactic could be outright damaging to your site.
Take a look at what Glen Allsopp wrote in one of his ViperChill.com posts, after he had sent out a tweet concerning his lower than expected search engine rankings:
“I received a personal reply from Google’s head of web-spam, Matt (Cutts), who asked me if, when a blog post goes live, I ping certain services…
Though I wasn’t pinging the services Matt asked me about, I was pinging a few with a foreign domain extension that he had mentioned and a lot of others, so I decided to remove all but a couple of them from my list.
A few days later and my rankings were back where they should be.
How crazy is it that some behind the scenes WordPress setting was costing me search rankings for my own brand name?”
So… while I wouldn’t worry too much about pinging too little, pinging too much could potentially be a problem.
Could You Be Pinged as a Spammer?
There’s one more thing about pinging too much.
By default, WordPress.org pings update services like Ping-O-Matic EVERY time a post is edited.
Do you like to edit your posts ruthlessly like I do – even way after they’ve been published?
Our relentless editing could result in excessive pinging. Could we be ‘pinged’ as spammers as a result?
There are plenty of disagreements on the issue.
However, let’s be reasonable here.
Have you ever heard of any site penalized by Google or any other search engine for excessive pinging? Neither have I.
But if you are a “better safe than sorry” kind of person, installing a ping-controlling plugin like WordPress Ping Optimizer will give you peace of mind.
(DISCLOSURE: I don’t personally use any pinging plugins, so can’t vouch for any of them. I prefer to use as few plugins as possible – I think there’s more danger in a hacker finding a door to your site through a plugin than an imaginary penalty from excessive pinging.)
Marketing Takeaway
You’ve got 30 seconds to update your ping list.
Go to Settings > Writing > Update Services.
Time starts now…
From Ana with
Thank you Ana! You confirmed my suspicions. I’m working on an ebook project with a friend whose contribution was written a few years ago and includes “advice” about pinging. It seemed out of date and now I can rewrite that section with confidence.
Incidentally, when I landed here I clicked the “no thanks” option on the updates offer, but after reading the content, I searched out the updates offer again and clicked yes. Also bookmarked your site. Quality content beats pinging every time!!
Sweet; honored! 😉
Hi Ana,
I just want to say thanks for sharing the great article.Pinging helps to make content indexed in search engines whenever we update the content not for ranking.
Right, pinging makes the search engines AWARE there’s content they need to index. Rankings are a horse of a different color! 😉
Hey Ana! Great post. I always thought that adding more ping services means more traffic. This post completely changed my mind.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks.
Happy to help, Manas; thanks for stopping by.
I have used too many Pings way back my blog wasn’t active much now disabled it will it cause any ranking issue??
I highly doubt it excessive pinging will CAUSE rankings to go down on its own, Aayush. There’s got to be something bigger than that.
As Per Guide, I Have Stopped Pinging.But the issue is I update my blog on weekly or after every two weeks but indexing process is too long any guide how can I improve that? 🙂
Here’s the thing, Aayush – what is the point of pinging? Indexing. What’s the point of indexing? Google rankings.
What’s in the core of Google rankings? Great content and links.
Your content WILL get indexed. But it will ONLY rank, if that content is good enough, which is proven by links.
Very simplified, but close enough.
Thanks for your post. I realized that I was a spammer in ping. I added an update services 1 list of about 40 url pings. After posting every post I usually ping on ping sites. once again thank you for letting me know this. Do I need to remove 40 urls in the update services section? Look forward to receiving early reply from you. Love
You and every other blogger out there, Eric…
Just remove those services. Go down to Pingomatic. That’s it.
Just checked it Ana and it is turned on in WP. Thanks for an informative article.
?, Ahmad.
Thanks for the article Ana. I had no clue about the pinging. I learned something new!
Glad to hear I could help, Jesse.
Hi,
I know this article has a few months on it, but it is new to me! I found it searching for an answer to a question in which my friends and I couldn’t agree on the answer. Your page doesn’t answer it for us, but does bring up other interesting points about “pinging”.
First, about our argument: We haven’t found any documentation (so far) that explains IN DETAIL what causes WordPress to send a ping. For example, if you add a post, yes, we all agree that a ping is sent. What if you change an old post to new with a new date? We assume it sends a ping for that.
What if you change a few words, or add a new paragraph to a previously posted story, but do not update the original date of publication? Technically, the post has “changed” which should mean a ping would be sent telling the engines about the “change”. But does it?
For example, imagine that I write a post on my site about this exact situation. Three months later, I am able to finally find a source online that explains the pinging criteria. I return to the article, add the new link, but do not change the posting date. Will anyone find out about the change??
And secondly, about pinging services. I have noticed that different services ping different servers/services. For example, ping farm supposedly only pings Ping-o-Matic; while toppinger pings all of Google in a multitude of countries plus twingly. Based on what you have written, it might make sense NOT to use toppinger because it is pinging each of the countries individually.
Thanks for the article, it was helpful even though it didn’t answer MY specific question! But I will keep searching.
#NerdTalk – LOVE it! 😉
You are so right, Joe; this post didn’t answer your question(s)…
The good news is that it doesn’t have to (aside from satisfying our own curiosity, of course!)
Truth is I believe pinging, as we know it, is (or will be in the near future) obsolete.
Between search engines and social media, discovering/indexing new content is as simple as a social media share.
Hi Ana, Thanks for a great post. You write blog about ping submission, i think ping submission always help to get traffic but from wrong sites.
Honestly, I think getting ANY kind of traffic from pinging is wishful thinking at this point, Donna.
Plenty of other, a LOT more productive!, things to focus on.
This is what I’ve been looking for…
So basically using single service(e.g. ping-o-matic) is enough for inviting bots to index my site & there’s no need for such long list of ping services, right??
Absolutely, Matt.
I also think that a simple social media share acts as a ping, by the way.
Hi Ana,
I am new to this blog and I find it quite engaging.
I am the founder of a tech company APPTech, and our developers for WordPress are usually interested in posts like this. Pinging a WordPress site is not the only thing we should be stressed about.
This blog has helped us get an insight about the right procedure for pinging a website.
Thanks and hope to visit another blog of yours soon!!
NOT anything we should worry about AT ALL, Abhishek. 😉
Hey Ana, thank you so much for the detail review. There’re times where I tend to ping thousands of network about my blog, but I not sure whether it would help my site or don’t. Perhaps it just feels great to share my site to so many places but the growth is unknown.
Will try other more quality way of bringing traffics instead, like converting my content to infographic, PowerPoint slide, or even video and share it to all websites and social media channel to earn more traffics and back links.
Thanks again. 🙂
No need to waste time, JJ – even if it doesn’t take long.
Seconds add up! 🙂
Hi, Ana that was a great article describing wordpress ping. 🙂
Thanks, Kapil!
I never expected to have such a such an in depth and detailed analysis on “Pinging” some day. You made my day Ana thanks.
That’s because you haven’t met ME, Dolly. 😉
Ana, I mostly agree with your post. In fact, isn’t it fair to say that any blogger/webmaster/affiliate marketer (whatever!) worth his salt should know not to fool around with the pinging thing? I mean, yes, we’re not all at the same point in our knowledge and/or development – BUT a guy slapping up a site & pinging the sh– out of it sounds so 2009!
But you did bring up an interesting side issue with the Google site indexing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you are a user in good standing with Google Webmaster Tools, if you submit a fairly “regular” type of site, then you shouldn’t have any problems getting indexed. I can say from experience that getting my site(s) indexed has never been an issue.
Now traffic on the other hand….
Completely agree with you, Otis – even new sites won’t have too much trouble getting indexing, just might take a bit longer… No need to ‘game’ anything. (that’s what pinging feels like these days!)
Hey Ana, you have mentioned some great tips here about pinging, recently one of my blgo was not getting index on Google,I was pinging so hard but no results :(. So I decided to stop pinging and magic happened after 4 day my blog got index. I am in love with your article Ana. Keep posting great stuffs.
Plenty of much more important things to worry about, Jitendra! 😉
Glad to hear your site was indexed just fine; that’s the way it should be!
Great Article. These many days I was thinking about pinging my websites but I don’t know what will happen in the backend after pinging. Clear explanation.
And now you do! Thanks for coming by, Kannan.
Hello Ana,
This was an interesting read, first I started off thinking about ping services, and how I can increase the traffic to my blog by that…and as I read through, I realized it wont be so easy after all.
Thanks for all the pointers, they are really helpful.
So glad you’ve actually READ it, Praveen!
Amazing how few people do it these days…
Hi Anna,
Ping services are very commonly in SEO community since pre panda-penguin era. In WordPress this is very helpful. Currently I strongly believe that if you are regularly updating your website with quality content & promoting on social media, Google crawlers will love to crawl & index your website very oftenly.
Hear, hear!
Very nice article. I read your post Ana, and was impressed.
Your reply is more practical and helpful. I hope it will be helpful for too many people that are searching for this topic. Great post!
Appreciate it, Dmitry.
Nice blog, by the way! Internet marketing in Russian; one of the first ones I’ve read. 😉
Another great read from you Ana!
I can certainly relate my thought with yours in this factor. Pinging excessively is not really my style. Neither I could use any such plugin for my site.
Thanks, Rocky! ?
Hi Ana
Want to thank you for teaching me a new word… hogwash! Love it…
I thought pinging was finished with, interesting read! I used to use a long list of pings but I gave up on it.
Thanks for this
Joe
;), Joe – so happy this Russian chick could teach you some English tricks!
Hi Ana,
Great You covered what i issue i have been facing rom last two week that is decrease in traffic i didn’t know the exact proble so that i could solve it but here thanks to you . You just made my day by solving this issue.
So glad to hear it, Yahya.
HI Ana
thanking you for your valuable article
you have written about PING, TRAFFIC, and google analytics which is very important to me for my blog.
you have done a great job for me
waiting for your next post
Glad to hear it, Aadeefaa.
Hi Ana, Thanks for this post.
wordpress haI get a masiv list of some ping list from shout me loud blog.
i want to know that,
having one ping site give me batter result or more than one ping site give me more batter results ?
thanks ! and waiting for your response
Hi, Snigdha – yes, I’ve seen Harsh’ list at shoutmeloud… It’s a bit long. 😉
You won’t get ‘better’ results either way; however, as I wrote in the post, there’s a chance you get banned from some services if you ping them too much. With my list of pinging services, that won’t be a problem.
Hi Anna,
It is my first visit to your blog and you have written some useful data here. I have seen some bloggers who craze in using the big ping list and they beleive that their new update will get indexed easily. It’s a myth!
I use Pingler and Ping-o-matic to send pins to bots and invite them to grab the fresh update. I never over send the pins as I’m familar that the consistent blog updates, sitemap submission, and having robots.txt file would help the new posts get indexed faster in Google and other search engines.
Good that I have read your well-written content, see you soon!
Google indexes pages so quickly these days… we don’t really need to lift a finger for it, yet people are still obsessed about it!
It’s as if indexing equals ranking… Ha!
Thanks for the thumbs up, Mathew.
As many success bloggers say, istalling so many plugins can make a blog page load very slow.
I choose not to install this wp ping plugin, I think resubmission on google webmaster will work better.
I agree, Hajar. Doing nothing (just letting WP pinging do its job) will work just as well. 😉
Hi Ana,
I have never paid attention to pinging and it’s an issue I never thought about before. But, your title drew me in!!! 🙂
It does seem that there are so many other ways to generate traffic and build a loyal following.
FYI – thanks for sharing where the term originated. I served in the Navy at a sub base and worked on 28 different fast attack submarines in the early 90’s. You brought back some great memories for me!
Have an awesome weekend!
~ Don Purdum
Learned something about you, Don!
Thanks for coming by – as always.
Hi Ana:
RE:”PS How did you find this post anyway? I am always curious; would appreciate it if you could remember.”
You asked Andrew the above.
I found this post, because I subscribe to your RSS feed with the free RSS reader which can be customized at:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/t.htm?YA0BAD0w5A,,e
RSS feeds are a form of pinging and have come to be somewhat neglected.
RE:”Too Much Pinging Could Cost Google Rankings?”
Well, I am certainly guilty of this one, because I have a very long ping list (for years) on my WordPress blog.
I will prune it drastically and report back in a few weeks.
By the way, when I make a blog comment and it is published/approved, I make sure to ping the comment url (since the post may be dated and there is no telling what the crawl schedule of spiders may be).
This pinging is important especially on sites with the CommentLuv plugin.
Finally, a note on REPEATED PINGING of backlinks.
When I create a backlink on another site (blog comment, social media content), I routinely ping the url multiple times; automatically through a paid version of Pingler.com or through free multiple pings with PingExpert.com
I want any SE to discover my backlink or content ASAP. (Different search engines have different crawl schedules so it is my view that Google and others realize this
and do not necessarily punish repeated pinging).
By the way, not every blog I comment on has a site map.
Ana, I wonder what your view is on repeated pinging as I described?
Thanks for any feedback.
Robert
RSS feed… Funny I heard someone on FB asking about customizing their RSS feed and the advice they got was ‘Don’t bother!’ 😉
Thanks for letting me know how you found me, Robert, and taking your time to leave a great comment.
I do remember I used to use the same comment pinging strategy you asked about. That was a long time ago (at least, seems like it…)! And mostly because Google was a lot slower to crawl anything back in those days. Not so now. As I mentioned, simply sharing the post on social media will ensure the post you are commenting on, including your comment, will be crawled, plus wins you a nod from the content creator. Win-win.
The flaw (and the time sucker!) here is the fact that it’s useless to ping it (meaning you won’t get any benefit out of it anyway) until the comment is approved. Thus you have to go back to every blog post you comment on to check on the status of your comments.
Who has the time!!!
Take your comment, for instance; it was sitting in spam until I fished it out and it took me literally months to get to it. (at least I found it, right?)
Bottom line: I don’t think it does you any good, plus takes up your time and money! (a paid Pingler account?!) 😉
Robert, from the bottom of my heart: focus on things that actually grow your business!
Hi Ana,
This certainly is a blogging essential. Yet, I know it’s confusing to a lot of people because there’s just too much info out there. It gets confusing, eh?
This sets the records straight for bloggers who want to be sure their content is indexed properly (I know I do).
-Donna
Thanks so much for the thumbs up, Donna – have a wonderful weekend!
Hi Ana,
Should we use Ping optimizer plugins in 2016. I have read some articles which suggests that wordpress has changed the way it pings services and there is no need of installing a extra plugin.
Could you please give your views on this and can you share your latest Ping service list
I was going to simply update the post with some new, more up-to-date info, but ended up re-writing the entire post, Manpreet. ?
Feel free to come back to it to learn more, but to answer your questions:
– I don’t believe we need to use optimizer plugins,
– my ping list is down to just one service: Ping-o-matic.
Hey Ana. I just wanted to drop you a quick comment to say thank you for posting this valuable information. There really seems to be a lack of real clear facts surrounding the area of “pinging” on the net. Thankfully both yourself and Viperchill supplied the answers that I was looking for.
Like many people here, I too was using a pretty big ping list that I had added to my blog some time ago. I don’t remember who suggested that it would be a good idea, but I clearly took the advice of someone who didn’t know what they were talking about! We live and learn.
It would be interesting to know how many people here had seen some positive results from removing their extensive ping lists. I’m about to remove the ping list that I had on my blog today. I will bookmark this blog post and return with a further update if I see any change.
Thanks again!
Andrew
Andrew, Andrew, Andrew… your comment was so nice and complimentary I had to double-check my facts to make sure I was steering you in the right direction.
I was! ?
However, there was so much more I wanted to add to the post… I ended up staying up all night re-writing it. Writer’s curse: nothing is ever good enough. ?
Take a look at it now; it’s completely new and, hopefully, much better.
PS How did you find this post anyway? I am always curious; would appreciate it if you could remember.
Hi Ana. As promised I have returned! Loving the new version of this blog post. Sorry that I caused you to stay up all night rewriting it! But I know what you mean. I rewrite and edit old posts all the time and like you I sometimes just end up binning the old one and starting from scratch completely. I don’t know if its curse or a blessing since I know the big “G” likes us to keep things fresh!
Anyway, as promised I am back with my findings. In answer to your question I found your post as I was looking for information because of a question that I was asked on my blog. It caused me to start looking for more answers about pinging and if it could potentially damage SEO. I used several search terms and found your page under the term “could pinging a WordPress site damage seo”. I believe your post also shows up when searching “ping spam”. There may be others, I did quite a bit of research on this subject!
Since last time I was here I have concluded that using large lists of ping services can cause some minor damage to SEO. Since removing my list of ping services I have seen a slight difference in overall rankings over the last couple of weeks. Its amazing to think that such a small change could cause any difference at all. This could of course be a complete coincidence, but I don’t think so. After delving a bit deeper I think I have figured it out a bit more.
In short it would seem that some of the huge lists of ping update services that a lot of people are using are sending out negative signals in terms of SEO. Some of the ping services are out dated, dead links or services that will ban you from over using them. It would seem that using these lists of update services doesn’t cause a massively negative effect on SEO. However, I believe extensive ping update lists are enough to cause some minor drops in search rankings when used every time we hit publish.
You have hit the nail on the head here Ana when you say that there are better ways to get your content indexed. Sharing your posts socially and keeping that ping list to just the default settings is easier and safer!
Anyway, I’ll go now before my blog comment turns into a full page article! Thanks again Ana for the update, it’s great! I look forward to reading more about traffic generation on your blog. By the way, if you would like to see the blog post that I wrote on the subject of pinging, you can see it here: http://makemoneyonline.zone/wordpress-ping-update-services-help-damage-seo
Speak to you soon Ana!
Regards,
Andrew
So sorry your comment got lost in the bowels of my commenting system, Andrew!
Glad I fished it out though and totally appreciate you coming back to let me know how it went (and how you found me to begin with.)
Haven’t read your post yet, but will.
Pinging is one of those things that doesn’t help at all, but could absolutely harm. That was my conclusion as well.
Have a great Sunday (and a week) and hope to see you back at TGC!
Hi Ana,
Great You covered what i issue i have been facing rom last two week that is decrease in traffic i didn’t know the exact proble so that i could solve it but here thanks to you . You just made my day by solving this issue.
Sorry to hear you have this problem, Ravinder; glad this post helped in some ways.