How and When to Ping and What It Is

Pinging is a way to communicate with search engines and notify them of changes and updates to your site. Why would you want to do this and when's the best time to do it? This article will identify when to ping, how to ping, and what it is.

As I just mentioned, pinging notifies the search engines of an update or change to your site. When you make a new post on your blog, for example, you'll want to notify search engines of this update. This is because pinging calls the search engine spiders over to your site to check out your new content. This ensures that your new content gets indexed in the search engines quickly.

You want to do this because you can't just assume that the search engine robots will find your content. They will typically eventually find it, and there are other ways to get your content noticed such as link building which can be done in a number of ways. You can use social bookmarking sites to quickly build some links to your site and your new content and this will ensure that it gets adequately crawled. The point is to build some links to your new content and like a new road Google can use that to send its spiders to your site and check out your new content to verify it.

As far as when to ping, really any time you make a change to your site or add any kind of new content you should think about pinging. There are other ways to get your site indexed quickly like link building, but none are as easy as pinging generally, depending on how you go about doing it. You can't over ping a site unless you really go out of your way to do it which you wouldn't be doing either way, so generally the bottom line is any time a change is made to your content you should think about going ahead and doing it.

Now as for how to ping, there are a number of ways to go about doing this. You can have it done automatically for you through a number of services. WordPress, the popular blog software for example, automatically pings new posts and changes to your site when you make them.

Some people still don't trust services which auto ping for you, and if your page isn't pinged automatically there are alternative services which are still extremely simple to use.

Check out this video I made showing exactly how and when to ping a web page in just a couple of seconds.

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