Many of us have heard of pinging or pingbacks, but what do these terms mean and how can they help your blog?
Pinging lets dozens of search engines and blog directories know when your site or blog has been updated. It then tells their robots to check your site for new content. In basic terms, the more you ping, the more search engines your site will be listed in.
If you are a WordPress user, then every time you publish a new post, WordPress alerts Ping-O-Matic telling it to ping a bunch of other services.
There are many other blog search engines other than Ping-O-Matic, and unless you add more ping URL’s to your Updated Services, you are not sending out as many pings as you could potentially be.
Update Your Services
Like I said, the only service WP pings to is Ping-O-Matic. Here is a lot of sites you should add to your Updated Services if you want to send out more pings. Here are the steps:
1. Log-in to your WP Admin
2. Go to ‘Options’
3. Go to ‘Writing’
4. Under ‘Updated Services,’ copy and paste the following list of sites:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
5. After you have done that, hit the ‘Update Options” button and you are good to go!
Congratulations, you will now be pinging to a few dozen more sites!
Yup, very useful.
I am getting a 404 error.. Hmmm? Anyone know why?
Hi Nate, it’s my understanding that the more services you add in WP the longer it takes to actually have your post published to your blog. What I do is remove those services entirely and use Pingoat.com after I make a post. True, it’s a manual effort, but one that keeps me mobile when I want to get on with writing or surfing. I supposed I could just place Pingoat in the service box on WP, but it’s just become a habit.
I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts about this approach.
You’re right Mark – since I’ve been adding gradually to my list of pinging services over the months, my blog publishing time has too, increased. You can always leave the page mid-way through ‘posting’ your blog and it will still go live – but not all the services will be pinged. 🙂
David
I think i’ll try this out… How effective is this in comparison to pinging the more popular ones such as Google, Yahoo, Syndic8, Technorati, ect.?
What if you end up pinging the same place 27 times?
@Sucker: that is something I think that needs to be dealt with carefully, which is the reason I use Pingoat since it pings many different services. In fact, I believe it has the most destinations compared to what I’ve seen.
I wonder if there’s a service to automatically digg and stumble all your posts 😉
That’s too blackhat, I’m telling you. 😉
I would pay for that 😉
Thank you. You are awesome!
Feedburner also offer a PingShot service which I use. I don’t bother to ping any services from within WordPress. That way there is no delay when publishing posts. I let Feedburner do all the hard work for me. It works well for me.
I’ll give it a shot.
Something I used to do alot, now I think it’s better to use an external handler for pinging such as pingoat.
I have to second that, use an external handler.
I like pinging technorati most since I am stats obsessed. It pings everytime a new article is published, and I usually ping them manually at least once a day lol
thanks for the updating that list . . my old list was dying a slow death!
Same here, thanks for the updated list Nate.
I use Pingoat and a few others that are listed in my WP. Me greedy? Heck yeah 😀
I have several in my WP dash already, but will be adding a few of those you listed. Thanks.
Thanks Nate. I picked up a couple of new ones! Nice job as always.
I think you should update the list… or maybe it’s just me: I tried it and got errors from a few sites…
I know I’m in the out-in-left-field minority here, but since my 2Dolphins blog is (Classic) Blogger-based, there seems to be no way to automate post-publishing pings. But maybe someone knows how I might be able to script the addresses Nate has listed and I could fire them off via a batch file or such manually after I post new content?
There are a few ping sites that I manually hit after clicking the “Publish” button, but I feel like there’s probably much more I could be doing…
I’m interested in knowing this too, since my blog is also hosted on blogger.
Thanks
Simon
Mine’s actually hosted on my own web space under my own domain name, but it’s still Blogger-based.
I know that I’m missing out on some of the plugins and such, but overall, I’m reasonably happy with Blogger as my CMS and don’t quite feel confident enough in my skills to try to migrate over to WordPress.
Thanks for the list ! Hopefully it won’t disrupt my posting too much while waiting for the pings.