Blog Pinging

Wait! No! I didn’t insult you just now! I swear I didn’t! Ok…… maybe I need to explain what pinging is before you continue with that indignant little hissy fit you’re throwin’. Sheesh….. here goes…..

There are several blog search directories on the internet. Technorati, Feedburner, blo.gs, and Weblogs are just a few of the well-known ones. Blog directories pull their search results from blogs. And they’ll only pull results from the blogs they know about. That’s where pinging comes in.

Pinging is simply telling a blog search directory that you have new content. Each search directory has its own procedure to do this, but it is generally very simple… just follow the directions at each site.

The easiest way that I’ve found to ping a lot of blog search engines at once is to visit Pingomatic. Just enter your blog name, the address for your blog, and (if you know it) your blog’s RSS feed. Check off all of the directories that you would like to ping. (I ping every directory except the Specialized Services ones.) Hit the little button that says, “Send Pings!” and wait until it’s finished.

Normally, a few directory pings will fail. That’s to be expected, but you can’t go back to the front page and resubmit everything immediately. You’ll get a page that admonishes you for trying again so soon. That’s actually a good thing. The directories that accepted your first ping could penalize you for multiple attempts in a short amount of time.

If you want to make sure each one gets pinged, you can visit each directory that failed. Usually, I don’t bother. I post frequently, so I just assume that the next time I ping, the directories that failed the first time will play catch-up and grab the stuff they missed this time.

This whole process is even easier if you use a Wordpress blog. You can go to Options> Writing. Scroll down to “Update Services” and enter Pingomatic’s address to make your blog ping automatically whenever you add new content. It is supposed to be there by default anyway… just give it a quick check to make sure that it is.