Do You Ping?
One of the things people write about a lot in the blog world is “Pinging”. Apparently it should help you increase your traffic and/or backlinks.
Pinging is basically a notification to a website or service that you have updated the content on your blog. Most blog platforms do this automatically, but you can also add services or do it manually.
Problem is, while many people advocate it, I haven’t been able to find anyone who can prove it has the benefits people say it does …
I don’t ping.
While of course I leave the WordPress defaults, and have tried the more comprehensive services, I long ago gave up.
All I saw was an increase in bots. No new human beings found me. No great boost in backlinks, and I have a theory many of the backlinks you do get are discounted by Google. Technorati seldom sends visitors, Feedburner picks up your site anyway.
After seeing pretty much nothing for my efforts, not a solitary referral visitor, I stopped trying. If someone could show me some advantage to doing it I would be all ears!
I can understand if your site has so few backlinks that Googlebot ignores you, if you get indexed faster more power to you, but I would much prefer to encourage spiders through links than relying on a third party pinging service.
Perhaps I have just been put off by all those “make money in your sleep fully automated blog traffic system that sucks money out of people’s wallets” ads …
So, please, someone out there, show me that pinging does work? Have I got pinging all wrong? Is it really the magical traffic and SEO secret people make it out to be?
I don’t ping. I have never pinged. I write my own blog software so I know it’s not pinging on my behalf. Any my readership is just fine, thank you (and the aggregator sites seem to manage to find me, albeit grudgingly).
I’ve looked at few long lists of services and simply left default ping in wordpress. I don’t get much visitors from technorati and likes either.
But I do find manual feedburner ping useful. I may publish before I finish usual things like editing permalink and ability to refresh feed is nice.
I’ve allowed pining from all of my WordPress blogs and I used to ping manually (using Pingomatic) for another blog I have that was coded from scratch but I have to agree with you that I’ve never noticed that is was worth worrying about so I don’t do manual pings anymore.
I pinged for a few months but recently kicked the habit. Zero evidence it drove a single soul to my blog.
I thought pinging was automatically done be wordpress. In my admin panel, I see ping pingomatic.
I think pinging your blog is a great scam :D