Monday, January 15, 2007 8:31 PM
If you are anything like me, seeing the title of this post, you probably asked yourself "what is a ping server and why should I care?" You may also ask yourself, "Ron Popeil?"
Well, first question first. The Wikipedia covers it pretty well: "Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.) That is, the tool sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more 'ping servers,' which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material [see Ping (Blogging)]."
As to why you might care; candidly, you might not. However, if your goal is to get your latest post disseminated to the largest possible audience as quickly as possible, you just might, because pinging these ping servers will help you reach that goal.
Ron Popeil? Well that was just window dressing. But, hey, if you are in the market for a Pocket Fishermen, stop by Ronco.com.
Back to the more serious subject at hand, I talked to some technical folks in my network and sounded them out on the topics of Pings and Ping Servers. The rest of this post is based on their findings (and they have been studying the topic, believe me). My hope is that their lessons learned can benefit others in the blawgosphere as well.
The Importance of Pings
The effective use of ping servers is an often overlooked aspect of promotion that can be vitally important. Using Blawg's Blog as an example, I’ll briefly run down the servers I automatically notify when I update my blog with brief explanations as to the whys and hows.
Technorati & Google Blog Search
These are the two largest and most popular blog search engines. Google does a pretty good job of eventually figuring out when your blog has been updated without you pinging them. It just sometimes takes a few hours. Technorati on the other hand can often take days, if ever, to recognize that a new post has been published. Pinging these services is crucial because searchers often sort their results by date. If a particular search yields hundreds of results within the last couple of hours, and these engines don’t know your post exists for a few hours (or days), your post will appear too far down the page for anyone to ever find it. Even if a little delay doesn’t bother you, it’s better to ping them to make sure your posts are included instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping that they’ll eventually show up.
Servers:
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Bloglines & Newsgator
At least according to my feed stats, these two web-based feed readers are used by more than half of the subscribers to Blawg's Blog. It is not completely clear how often these services check to determine if a subscribed-to feed is updated, but testing has shown delays of at least an hour. Therefore, if you want your subscribers that use Bloglines and Newsgator to get your new post as quickly as possible, you will need to ping these respective sites.
Servers:
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
Feedburner
This one is only necessary if you use Feedburner to distribute your feed. Feedburner checks to see if your feed has been updated approximately every 30 minutes. If you make a post one minute after their last check, there will be a 29 minute delay before any of your subscribers "know" you’ve made a new post. This delay can also cause problems with the other servers you’ve pinged (like those noted earlier), because unless FeedBurner updates your feed, those other servers think you’ve pinged them for no reason.
http://ping.feedburner.com
How Do You Do It?
Almost all blog editor platforms make it very easy to add the above ping servers. And, once added, the "pinging" is done automatically. To borrow a phrase from the aforementioned Ron Popeil, you can "set it and forget it." As an example, I am using Windows Live Writer, which includes a choice called Preferences in the Tools menu. When I set up my ping settings, I simply chose Preferences > Ping Servers and then cut and pasted the above noted URLs into the text box provided. Thereafter, whenever I publish a new post, Live Writer 'pings' the Ping Servers I have added to my preferences. I have not yet examined all of the blog editing software out there, so I can't provide specific instructions for adding these ping server settings to each one. However, you may want to check the preferences or settings area of your blog editor, or save yourself some time and simply ask your blog provider how to add them. You can use the above URLs provided. Simply cut and paste the URLs into the appropriate locations in your blog editor.
Hope this helps, and if you decide to buy one of those Pocket Fisherman, I hope you catch a big one.