To Ping or Not to Ping?

Pinging your website to dozens of update services used to be common practice. But these days, less is more in the pinging department. By default, WordPress has only one site listed within its Update Services area – Ping-O-Matic. And that is all you really need.

What is pinging?

Pinging is a way for websites to tell the world they have new or updated content. WordPress has this feature built in and automatically notifies (pings) update services each time you add or edit a post.

The update services then take the information they receive from your website and tell other search engines, weblogs, feed aggregators, social networks and all subscribers to those services, that your blog has been updated.

Why is this important? One word: TRAFFIC! Notifying all those services of fresh content the instant it is posted, helps improve the speed with which search engines find and index your content.

Why Ping-O-Matic is all you need

Ping-O-Matic is a stable, well-maintained service that stays on top of the ever-changing world of pinging services. They regularly verify that their downstream services are legitimate and working properly.

Ping-O-Matic is owned and operated by The WordPress Foundation and they currently send out pings to all the most important update services and they are constantly updating and maintaining their list. They do all the work, allowing you to focus on running your business.

Trying to manually maintain your own list of pinging services is simply not worth your time. New services are constantly springing up and established ones shutting down because the task of maintaining a reliable service is just too difficult.

In fact, many pinging services have closed their doors because more than 90 per cent of the pings received were spam. A significant amount of energy was devoted to attempting to find the valid blog pings obscured by the torrent of junk. Some services even stopped accepting pings from anyone, except those coming directly from Ping-O-Matic.

How WordPress’ default ping settings can hurt your blog?

WordPress will automatically ping your blog every time you publish or edit a post, which is a good thing. However, if you edit posts a lot, especially within a short period of time, then it becomes a BIG problem.

Some people obsess over the smallest of errors or layout issues on their website, causing them to constantly edit their posts. With each edit, WordPress sends a ping to the update services. Excessive pinging like this can get your website banned from the update services for being a spammer.

WordPress’s advice for serial post editors is to turn off pinging entirely. However, a better idea is to use a plugin to manage your pinging activity.

Conclusion

• Use the fewest number of update services possible, preferably just one, Pingomatic.com.
  
  
• Install and configure a ping management plugin.
  
  
• Try not to over-edit your posts to begin with.