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How long list of Pinging Services could hurt your SERP

By 38 Comments

Pinging services are simply services to notify the world that your blog has published a new content. Back in the days when number of backlinks was considered most important factor to the relevance of a web content, many of us had a long list of pinging services on our blogs to notify as much sites as we can that we have published a new content and as well gain their backlinks. But today Google and other search engines have moved to value quality contents and quality of backlinks to number of backlinks in determining the relevance of a web content.

Reports have revealed that excessive pinging of blog posts on publication can hurt search engine ranking of your site. What most WordPress users don’t know is that on publication of any article, WordPress notifies their own pinging service called ping-O-matic which in turn pings and notifies other pinging services out there. Many of us are still using a long list of WordPress pinging services on our blogs without knowing the effect this could be having on their search engine ranking.

How long list of Pinging Services could hurt your Search Engine RankingGlen of Viperchill confirmed this in a blog post he published some time ago titled “The future of blogging: I had to tell you this” how he was contacted by Matt Cutts asking if he ping certain services whenever he published a blog post and how he reduced the list of pinging services he used on his blog and how his rankings went up again after some days. You can take some time and read the long blog post if you have got some spare time as I must warn you the article is almost 12k words.

Here is a list of the WordPress Pinging services I was using on my blog, but when I realized that my blog sends a ping to all the sites listed on the list every time I publish or edit a blog post I knew Google may see it as spamming so I decided to do something about it.

I did two things to my blog, one is reducing drastically the number of pinging services I used on my blog to just three. Yes, three important pinging services that mattered.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

You may be wondering why just three? Well since Ping-o-matic pings to other pinging services when I publish a new blog post, there was no essence of leaving the other pining services on my list to avoid double pinging of same posts so it won’t be considered as spam. So go to your WordPress dashboard under Settings > Writing > Update Services to just the 3 listed above.

Update: You can also check WordPress for updated services of XML-RPC Ping Services.

Secondly, I installed a Plugin called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Your blog may have been banned from pinging services as a result of ping spamming and you may not even know it yet and this could be making you to lose a lot of traffic. The fault may not be totally yours though as WordPress is known to send out pings whenever you edit or publish a new post, and if you edit a post 5 times, WordPress sends out ping same number of times and this could be considered as ping spamming and your blog could dearly pay for it.

Must Read: Some important WordPress Plugins for your WordPress blog

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin will ping to notify all ping services that it has updated encouraging search engine and other blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly. When you edit an existing post, your blog won’t have to send unnecessary ping to ping services and that way you won’t risk getting banned.

If you can avoid getting banned by pinging services, then search engines will quickly index your site whenever you publish a new post and you can immediately rank for your target keyword and more traffic will flow into your blog and probably the more money you will make.

What is your view about this post? Do you support using a long list of pinging services on a blog and why? Tell me what you think on the comment, use the comment form below t share your experience and views. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.

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Comments

  1. Hi Nwosu,
    I’m glad I read this article today. Infact, I use a wordpress ping list of over 160 ping services. I’ll try this your three ping services on my wordpress list and monitor what effect it would have on my SERP.
    Thanks for this once more.

  2. Hello Mavtrevor,
    What a nice and wonderful post every bloggers should know. At times i edit my blog post more then one time but before editing it, i always remove my ping sites so it won’t send out ping. I have not start using maxblogpro plugin yet but i’ll sure check it out. Thanks

  4. Excessive pings can be considered as spamming and could get one banned which will definitely affect the search engine’s response to indexing a site and thus may affect ranking.

  7. Hi Nwosu,
    I was reading your post deeply. So in first attempt I forgot to hit submit button and page goes refresh.
    I see your ping list and list provided by WordPress itself. My question is if there is a risk of spamming then why WordPress itself gives a huge list of ping services?

  8. WordPress by default sends ping to both its ping service and other ping services, but has failed to address this issue of multiple pinging when a post is edited, so if you edit your post 10 times your blog is going to send same ping 10 times and this may be considered as spamming and you know spamming is never considered a good thing. Another danger of pinging to so many ping services is bad linking, you never know which is bad to send your link to, so if i will advise anyone who has chosen to use more than the 3 i choose, it will be to use only the ones updated by WordPress. That’s why i included a link in the article and please also use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin to avoid being banned because of ping spamming.

  9. I have pasted your given 3 ping links. So if I use Ping O Matric then there is a need to delete ping list from default location?

  12. Needful post for the bloggers :)

    Yeah, I too cam across many bloggers who are using a list of ping services after publishing their posts. Hope this article would help them to understand the truth.

    I usually use pinglr.com to ping my new post.

    Good to read the useful posts here, its good!

  15. Hi Nwosu,

    This was another most controversial topic and many fellow bloggers are doing this mistake. After running blog for quite some time, I learned that most of the default settings in WordPress are much better than implementing any other strategy without the complete knowledge. Your post will help many bloggers to save themselves from falling into pitfall!

  17. I do not know why I am extremely skeptical about using these pinging services.
    I am very very sure that ONLY hard work pays.
    If you use stuff like this, how can you expect to get quality visitors to your site?

  18. The bots will scrape your content for some no-good-sites and rank above you even…thanks for your comment Ambika i always looked forward to hearing from you.

  19. Hi Nwosu,

    This focuses on the idea of overkill. It is like oversharing 1 piece of content. Share among a minimum number of channels so you do not experience pinging overlap and a slapdown from Google.

    Thanks for sharing!

    Ryan

  23. Thanks for mentionaing MaxblogPress Ping Optimizer. Someone introduced it to me few months ago but I forgot to install it on my blog. Yup, having a long list of ping services is no good due to the duplication issues etc, unless you use this plugin.

  25. Thanks for this great post and this smart list!I have problem with Technorati,I cant write a comment there.Do you know why?

  27. Thanks for this post, it’s really useful information for my work and for my personal blog. However, when i visit my dashboard I can only go as far as Settings > Writing < there is no Services option. Any ideas?

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