Hi everyone,
To all of you who have a Ping Optimizer plugin installed after reading my June post about the Ping Optimizer plugin, it’s important to realise the impact of publishing posts & how they get “pinged” to syndication and feed sites.
The point of this plugin is to reduce “ping spam” – i.e. pinging various sites too many times when you create new posts or pages. Many people are in the (good!) habit of saving their work at regular intervals, but if a post is pinged out to the world wide web at each of those times, you risk becoming a “ping spammer”. By the way, this is the WordPress default behaviour: when a post is saved, it’s always re-pinged, no matter how many times it’s already been pinged.
So Ping Optimizer reduces pinging to the moment of actual PUBLISHING of a post or page. So even when you post-date a post, once it goes live at the scheduled time, it will be pinged and will thus be picked up fairly quickly, and more importantly, at the right time, by the search engines.
There is one small downside though: some people like to publish a post to see what it looks like, and they then set the status back to “Draft” – but this can have a negative impact! If you publish a post and THEN make it draft again, for publishing later, it ONLY gets pinged when it’s first published – so if you’re going to post-date a post to several days/weeks in the future (rather than just a few hours), this could result in the search engines trying to index something that’s not yet available – and perhaps sending people on a wild goose chase.
So when you’re preparing an future posts, it’s worth bearing this in mind – always “Save as Draft” and use the “Preview” button in the top right near the “Save As Draft” button to check out how your post looks, instead!
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Elsie (13)
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Keith Goeringer (7)
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December 18th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
There is a free list (no optin) of about 180 ping engines that you can use to increase your blog ranking when using cbnet or maxblogpress on wordpress. why not use it ?
December 20th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Hi Olivier, there are indeed several free lists … but all the ones I’ve found through googling are very out of date (the URLs don’t work) – so I combined the results into ones that actually work
Why ping sites if they’re no longer live, was my reasoning.
August 22nd, 2010 at 7:55 am
Woah! Thanks for the heads up Tracy!:) Good thing you shared this tip.
August 22nd, 2010 at 11:11 am
You’re welcome Keith – yes, not many people are aware of this default WordPress behaviour!
I guess they’ll eventually change it in some future release?!
August 22nd, 2010 at 2:15 am
What’s your favorite Ping plugin?
Putting posts or articles in draft mode is great, however like you wrote it’s only going ping once not multiple times.
Nice post!
August 22nd, 2010 at 7:34 am
Hi Mari-lyn, I normally used MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer (see my post http://thesimpleblogcompany.com/2010/06/review-new-plugin-for-pinging/), which requires registration – but there is also one called “cbnet Ping Optimizer” which is essentially the same, without the need for registration – which I’m moving my sites over to.