What is Pinging?



Simply put, pinging is a method of verifying the presence of a place on the internet; and getting a response from that location. Ping is a program which is built into every operating system out there; it is one of the most commonly used tools in the system or network administrator's toolkit. It merely checks for an internet addresses existence, and then requests a response from that address (which is to make sure that the address is capable of receiving requests). As a point of information/trivia to amaze your friends: ping is an acronym for packet inter-network groper!

The Process

A ping can be used anytime someone updates their website, or more relevant for our purposes here, a blog. A blog of course has frequently updated information. More static types of websites are less frequently updated and therefore not pinged as often.

A blog may be updated as much as several times a day, and often are a venue for the author to market products or services they offer, or as part of an affiliate marketing business. The author gets commissions on sales of the product in an affiliate relationship, so it is vital for the author to make search engines aware of any new content on the blog ASAP. This way they will receive more traffic and thus, more sales.

Of course, not every blog, or every post on a blog is written with the intent of selling something. Quite often it is the case that a blog posting or an article is written just to convey information or provide entertainment to readers. No matter what the reason for new content, any site owner wants their content seen, so getting this new post indexed by search engines is key to getting more visitors to the page.

A lot of ping requests must be sent to many different servers in order to get the kind of traffic the author will want for their content. There are pinging services out there which save the author from having to go through the tedious and time consuming process of individually pinging many different servers.

Advantages

Using more than one of these pinging services is a good idea. This will mean that many more servers will be pinged and become aware of new content than if just one pinging service was used. This of course, means more traffic; and traffic is the be all and end all of having a website of any kind.

Search engines are constantly indexing websites (this is called crawling or spidering). When they visit one of the servers which have been alerted to the fact that your site has new content, the search engines will also now be aware of your new content! That is the crucial first step in getting your new blog posts indexed. The more servers you ping, the easier it will be for the search engines to locate and index your new content, making it easier for people to find.

A lot of blogging services let the author opt for extra pinging services, along with those offered by the blogging service itself. An author can find many pinging services with a simple internet search, and add any they desire to their account with the blogging service.

Disadvantages

There is one drawback to using multiple pinging services. This is that there will be some duplicate pings. This can sometimes result in a blog being considered spam by some servers. It is up to the author to make the call on how many pinging services should be used, as there is no one formula for determining how many pings it takes to be considered spam by any particular server.

Judicious usage of "blog and ping" can greatly increase web traffic. Just one of many tools out there to increase traffic, "blog and ping" nevertheless should not be overlooked as a way of attracting more visitors.