Mar 31, 2008

Inform Other Services With Your Recently Updated Websites

Pinging your website without knowing why you are doing it, might be a problem. Especially if you are pinging the wrong services.

A ping helps you to inform other services which collect information about your feeds and list them into their database. These services have a list containing recently updated websites.

Also, you must be aware of the fact that pinging won't deliver direct traffic to your website. It will simply generate indirect traffic to your pages by sending requests to other services which are using feeds for content.

Just like Technorati where people are searching blog posts on a daily basis, there are other tens of services which will be happy to list your feeds. Make sure you aim for the right ones. Some of them will be listing only blog posts, and others, will list everything.

If you have a website, you might find out that people are interesting in browsing small pieces of content for the simple reason they want to see if the article is worthy.

Some services, like Yahoo, after receiving a ping, they will put your websites on a list which is going to be "spidered". Having robot activity on your website is the ideal way to get listed in the major search engines.

Pinging your website it is the best way to attract search engines and get more traffic. Also, there are some people who are willing to use your feeds as content. This will quickly increase the area where you have links directing to your website.

The biggest disadvantage of having your feeds spread all over the Internet is losing a big amount of bandwidth. The traffic on your website is already a bandwidth problem, and if your costs aren't covering the earnings, you may want to quit using the feeds, or limit the amount of information which will be parsed by the feeds readers out there.

For example, instead of giving away all your article, you could create feeds which are delivering only a small description of the content of your article. It's quick, and cost effective.

Some example's of "what you shouldn't do":

* don't ping blog related websites if your website it isn't a blog

* if you have a blog, and you don't have podcasts, don't ping websites which are concentrating only on podcasts (just an example)

* ping only when you have updated your content

* do not ping your website if you have no feeds in it


All this info might be helpful and you should really focus on respecting other websites terms, unless you want your pings to be ignored.




 
@ Pinging 2008