At the Knoxvillle Internet Marketing meetup held recently, Felicia Slattery of Communication Transformation asked about how to set up Wordpress to ping the different blog directories that are available. (Pinging is a way to notify directories that you have made a new blog post. It’s good for traffic.) Although I am far from being a Wordpress/blog expert, I look for ways to add incremental traffic to my sites. I haven’t done the complete research to back this up but it seems to be the consensus that pinging is a good thing. (I absolutely HATE to pass on misinformation the web is so famous for!) With that disclaimer in mind, lets take a look at pinging.

Wordpress is set up by default to ping Ping-O-Matic, which according to its site is, “a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated.” So by default, your Wordpress blog is set up to ping around 20 services. You can also ping manually by going to individual sites and entering your blog/post information. The ping services are set up to automate this tedious task. Ain’t computers grand? Moving on.

So it would seem that the more pinging I do, the more traffic I get, right? Wrong. If you ping a list of services, some of your pings may be duplicated. Then you risk the possibility of being labeled a spammer. Not good. For example, if you ping Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat (both services that provide multiple pings for your post - is this making any sense?), then Technorati would be hit twice. So now a simple process to let the world know about your blog has become complicated. What to do?This is where I rely on other folks to do the legwork and hope the information is valid. Based on my “secondary” research there is a solution. The best explanation comes from Instant Info Online although I would normally be a bit suspect of a source like this due to its sparseness. Other sites seem to concur on the basic idea though. You can read the post to get the full scoop but this is it in a nutshell:

  • Some services have disabled their ping URLs and accept pings only from Ping-O-Matic
  • It would be best to use Ping-O-Matic and a select list of other individual services
  • Using the short list below would give extensive coverage without duplication
  • I can’t back any of this up but it is what I do

Ideal Ping List at the time of this post

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

OK, now we know which services to ping. How do we set up Wordpress to do this automatically? It’s simple really.

In later versions of Wordpress, choose the Settings tab
Then choose Writing
Under Update Services paste the list from above into the box
Don’t forget to SAVE

In older versions of Wordpress you will find the Writing option under the Options tab.

So, there you have it. The quick and dirty ping primer with ideal short list of ping services. Hope this helps you and brings your blog massive traffic.

Russell

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