Pinging Builds Blog Traffic, But Risks Abuse

The common practice of "pinging" enables you to alert major blog indexes like weblogs.com, blo.gs, Yahoo, and others that you have updated your weblog. The result is that these blog indexes and the search engines that monitor them will "re crawl" your site and quickly scoop up your new content. If you have a blog I suggest using Pingomatic to ping these various sites whenever you have posted new content. It can have an impact on your blog traffic and search engine positioning...but please please don't abuse it.

Tinu AbayomiPaul feels the same. He writes over at Search Engine Journal that some bloggers are spamming ping sites to achieve a higher search position and he is urging folks not to go there ...

The good news is, you don’t need to deluge the ping sites to get noticed. Doing so is often a waste of time, and may be a harmful one.

Your best bet for now is to continue to achieve your natural search engine position through blogging, basic search engine optimization, and a common sense approach to frequent updates.

Net - check out pinging, but be good.

Comments

[Tom]

It's actually worse than just this. My webhost has pretty much figured out that within minutes of some of my posts, many multiples of computers converge on my website, attempting to open up 1,000 connections to comment on my Movable Type install, effectively DOSing my site. This has happened three times in the last two days, and is almost exclusively within minutes of me posting - and pinging - one of these services.

It's almost like opening your front door to let people come read your work and letting in the bad weather. You can only block so many IP addresses from attacking your website, too.

[Tinu]

Hey Steve,

Excellent article in Web Pro News, quite succint (which is definitely not my strength). And thanks for mentioning me.

Just thought I'd mention though... I'm a she. :-D

Quite an interesting blog too, I'll be telling my readers about you.