If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want sites such as Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?
Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ a lot of things, not just a blog. Many years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping machines remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your computer, maybe across your network to other machines.
And that is basically what a ping is – one computer seeing if another computer is responding.
How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our blogs. The ping service evolves a bit from just a basic message saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a website service, rather than just them answering that they are there, it is taken as an indication from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.
The site receiving the message will reply back that it has received your message, usually with a “success” message. Of course, to reply they need to now what site sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your website address as the sender.
Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your website address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, usually because you have created new content that you want them to look at.
Identify New Content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, maybe later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is new. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your website.
And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other websites that we have new content and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come visiting quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.
The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab new content as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new content and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.
A Little Message Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various important websites that we now have an update on our own website and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.