Does pinging your blog post generate traffic?

Here is a little bit of information compiled after research about blog pinging, one of the ways which supposedly gets your site listed and ranked higher quicker. When your blog post is placed at the top of search results, you naturally get more traffic.

At the outset, let me explain what pinging is.  It is a way to let the various search engines know you’re your blog is just updated with fresh content. It is known fact that search engines like blogs because of frequent content updates. When you ping your just updated blog, search engines will quickly send their spiders and the indexing happen soon.

Bloggers who are new to the blogosphere ask me whether pinging really get your site noticed. I say yes.

 I have tested the theory several times in the past by manually going to http://pingmyblog.com/  and inserting the blog post URL aka permalink.  Pin my blog notifies my ping to several large pinging sites.

When I tracked the visitors through Google Analytics, I saw some of the traffic is coming from search engines and also a lot of spider activity can was on the blog.

My advice is to test yourself and conclude. Don’t use more than one ping site as the site notifies several pinging sites automatically.

Ping your blog to 40 pining services.

Talk to any seasoned Internet marketer and he will tell you how important it is to ping your blog as soon as you have published a new blog post.

Wordpress blogging software has an in built pinging service that automatically notifies several pinging services. Since blogger.com does not have that facility, it is necessary to manually ping your blog URL.

Here is a free pinging service that notifies 40 pinging services that include Google Blog Search, Google FeedBurner, Pingomatic, Weblogs.com, NewsGator, Yahoo!, Weblogalot and many more.

http://www.blogpingtool.com/

Is there any use in engaing pinging services?

I don't know! I am not very sure about the widespread cliam that pinging your blog's feed URL will drive free traffic. I tried it several times. Nothing happened. May be I should tried to monitor the traffic using special tracking methods.

Do you know the most talked about pining service called Pingomatic? It notifies plenty of search engines that the submitted blog is just updated with fresh content. Don't search eventually crawl blogs? What is the necessity in using pinging services?

One view is that search engines do send their bots to blogs periodically but it takes time, After all, they are too busy and the launching of new blogs make the process more delayed. That is why pinging your blog speed up the visit of search engines.

Is it so?

As a problogger, I have subscribed to pingomatic's blog feed. It was last updated on March 2009!

Does pinging increase traffic?

I don't think so. No pinging service contributes to getting traffic. This makes me wonder where all those pinging takes place and what happens after pinging? Are the pinged results crawled by search engine spiders?

What is pinging?
"Ping is a program that sends a series of packets over a network or the Internet to a specific computer in order to generate a response from that computer. The other computer responds with an acknowledgment that it received the packets". Source:Indiana University

In my early days of Internet marketing, I used these two services quite frequently.
http://www.pingoat.com/
http://www.pingomatic.com/

Gradually, as the work load increased, I simply did not find time to ping. Can anyone tell me if I should revive manual pinging?

Automatic Pinging.

I stumbled onto Autopinger.com yesterday and added my blogs.

What my doubt is, will autopinger function as the name suggests? Will it crawl my blogs and notify the blog search engines automatically without me doing any action?

I found there is a autopinger community in mybloglog.com. I joined promptly and asked the author of the community my question . So far, no reply has come.

Here is an interesting piece that I read just now at aplawrence.com about these pinging sites.
"....many of these sites cheerfully respond to any ping with a positive response even though they have no record of your site in their database at all. Many will just as cheerfully acknowledge a ping referencing a non-existent site. Pinging them may not automatically add your site; you may need to visit them and manually add your information before that ping has any value at that site."

My God, he read my mind!

So, what do you make out of it?

Have you joined blo.gs?

Blo.gs is the shortest url that I know. And it is owned by yahoo.com

Ok what it is about? Is it a blogging community? Is it a blog directory?
In their own own words, "this is a directory of recently updated weblogs and tools for tracking interesting weblogs, in the spirit of services like weblogs.com and blogrolling.com.

If you run a blog, you can ping this directory using the ping form or the other methods listed.

I just used the usual ping form and pinged it or you can say I tried to ping. The next page showed this message,"Refresh requested: http://blogavenues.blogspot.com/atom.xml".

Simply I don't know what is that supposed to mean. Have I been pinged or does it require more information or is there a bug?

Are you still pinging?

Ok, agreed, pinging is very important and we must do a ping after every post.

But do we do that really? No, I will say. Not even once in 3 months, I go to my favorite pinging service and do it. If at all I do it, I may do for a couple of my blogs only leaving the majority unpinged.

Lazy man, pure lazy! Oh, call me lazy woman, pure lazy!

Even though pinging takes only a few seconds per blog, I don't have the patience as if I have some other urgent work to attend. And I call myself a blogging coach and can you believe that? Yes, I train a few through email but nothing technical. It is too hot for me.

Got any news for me in blog promotion? I simply love to try out new ideas in blog promotion.

Big list of Blog Pinging Services.

I never assume my blog readers are highly experienced and 'know all' type.

That is why I do a little bit of research before introducing a new tool or service related to blogs.

What exactly happen when you Ping your blog?
Pinging lets the pinging services know that you have updated your blog and they can come to you blog, craw and get itself updated with your blog's content.

Like you, I too forget frequently to ping my blog but when I do, I use pingomatic only.
I am aware of a few other pinging services but I was surprised to learn that there about 11 such services when I stumbled onto another blog yesterday.(full credit given at the end of this blog post)

I quote from that blog:
"Remember pinging is important if you use feedburner feed since feedburner will come crawling around after you ping it and update your feed with the latest content. And based on its content other blog tracking services will update."

List of pinging services:

Pingomatic - the most popular. Pings several popular services and specialized services. Create a bookmark for each ping url.
Pingoat - Pings a huge collection of 52 blogging services, including special services and non English tracking services. You can easily select all services by selecting the category.
King Ping - Pings multiple services - 18 in all. Easy to check and uncheck boxes. And you can also create a bookmark with your settings.
Blogflux Pinger - Pings 32 services, including several specialized services and language specific services too.
Feedshark - Ping, submit, & promote your blog, feed, or podcast for free to multiple services. .
BlogBlip - Just enter the blog url and it will submit to 15 popular blog tracking services.
Ping The Empire - Pings 18 common blog tracking services.

Courtesy and gratitude: Quick online Tips.

The best pinging service.

I think this pinging service is one of the best in the field.

Just enter your blog url or it's feed url.

Select the blog search engines that are listed there and click submit.

In an instant, you get the results.