What/How/Why Do You “Ping” Google?

This question actually came in the form of a comment on my post of backlinks not needing to be indexed. The comment actually had a few other questions mixed in, which I’m intending to write about at a later date. But for now let’s just focus on the pinging question.

Can you please explain more about pinging? as i have no idea what pinging does? and what to ping? pinging my website? or pinging my backlinks? an article about pinging would be highly appreciated.

Ok so first of. Lets address the question of…

What Is Pinging?

Pinging in a web sense. Is basically alerting any service (Most often Google), that there is new content on your website. So for example, after I publish this blog post, I would want to “ping” Google and other services and let them know that “Hey, I have a new post/content up. You should definitely come and view it”. It seems simplistic, and at times I have had my doubts about whether this actually works. But, You can view the results of this yourself (I’ll go into detail later).

What Do I Ping? Backlinks Or Pages?

First off, We have to realise that with the use of pinging, comes the word “spamming”. That is, Constantly pinging Google over and over again with pointless content. When you ping a page that you have just placed on your webpage, there is not really any danger to this. And can only help. There isn’t really any risk what so ever about over pinging, or annoying Google  when you have legitimate content that needs to be pinged.

I think the next step up from that, Is pinging content that is old, But Google hasn’t indexed yet. This comes with a few dangers. For one, Google may know about your content already, but it is choosing not to index it. Maybe because it recognises it as spam, or maybe because it thinks the content isn’t valuable to a web user. In these cases, Pinging Google over and over again to get things indexed is really not desirable and although there isn’t any proof to back this up, I would think Google will end up just ignoring you all together. However, in saying that, Pinging old content that isn’t indexed just the once will be fine. And there really isn’t any danger to giving Google a quick nudge, But just try and avoid being a hassler.

I think one of the biggest questions out there at the moment about pinging, Is “Do I ping my backlinks”. That is, If you place a backlink on a forum profile, Or in a comment on a blog. Should you then go and ping that page. Once again, I think this is a grey area that you just get a feeling for over time. The biggest thing you have to remember, is that Google loves natural looking linking structures. When you are pinging everything almost instantly all in a row, Your page could go from having 0 backlinks, to Google seeing hundreds. In other words, Google will give you a big slap.What I generally do is do all my linking, and then leave them in a text file for atleast 2/3 days. Sometimes up to a week. I then ping them all at a later date. The reason I do this, Is because google has likely picked up on atleast half of the backlinks already, And I’m just letting it know “Hey, You forgot a few”. But other than that, I would not recommend pinging all your backlinks at once, straight after you build them.

Wait, So How Do I Use This Mystical “Ping”?

Ping uses the XMLRPC format for data requests. At this stage, If you’re asking what Ping is, You are likely not ready to build your own little ping software. For pinging individual pages, I recommend using Pingler.com. This ping site has a great list of “Ping URL’s”. Ping URL’s being essentially the address of the service that is ready to crawl your site. Pingler is great when you are running a static web page and just need to ping individual pages every now and again. But of course, What if you have a large list of URL’s? For that you can use PingDevice.com.  This accepts a large list of URL’s, and will ping them all in a row for you.

I will say that if anything, You want to use Pingler. The Ping lists it uses are far superior to anything else out there.

I Use WordPress, Do I Still Need To Ping?

Yes and no. Yes you still need to ping, No you don’t need to do it manually, WordPress does that for you automatically. Inside your WordPress Admin, Go Settings –> Writing. Inside there you will find down the bottom, A small box that has all the services you will ping when you publish a post. By default it pings Pingomatic, But you can add any service you want in here (Note it has to be a URL that will accept RPC pings, For example the list at Pingler.com). Be careful not to overload this with services, It will both make you “overping” places like Google (Not good), and it will make your posting slow on your blog.

How Can I Check If These Services Work?

The easiest way I have found, Is to check through your latest visitors. The best way to do this, is if you have CPanel hosting (The majority out there). Inside your CPanel, You should have something called “Latest Visitors”, Under logs.

Open this service. And you will see the latest visitors to land on your site. Most of all, It will likely be yourself . So how can you check that is Google, And not some random visitor? By the useragent ofcourse!

Essentially if you want to check if a certain ping service works fine. Then use it, Then refresh this page and see if Google comes a crawling! You will likely find other services come aswell. Yahoo, Bing, MSN, Altavista, and a bunch of other robots accept ping requests. And services like Pingler.com does include them.

Is That All?

Not exactly. There is still a number of things that I have left out of here for simplicity’s sake. But for the most part, Just remember to Ping new pages once. And ping your backlinks maybe a few days after you create them. Just to give Google a chance to find them naturally.

P.S. If anyone has any questions about this sort of stuff. I’ll set up a contact form in the coming day’s. So readers can ask questions etc. I get enough to my email and on forums, That I may aswell just post the answers here so everyone can get some benefit from them.