Word Press Off-Page SEO no 1 - Give Good Pings

Off-page SEO is about getting links, and one big advantage of blogs like WordPress is that they can ping.

A ping is the way WordPress automatically notifies certain blog and RSS directories (or ‘update services’) that your blog has been updated, creating a short-term link to your blog in the process. Now don’t ask me about the technology behind how it pings, just the thought makes my eyes glaze over.

All I need to know is that I must have at least one of these directories listed under ‘Update Services’ on the Options>Writing page in WordPress admin. And to make it easier, WordPress already comes with Pingomatic listed, which pings several update services every time you post.

But there are lots of update services you could ping - way more than Pingomatic sends to. The WordPress Codex has a long list of places to ping, and there are several even longer ping lists out there on the web. Many people want to ping their blog to as many services as possible.

Problem is, the longer your ping list, the longer your blog can take to post, which can get really annoying. One solution is the No-Ping-Wait plugin, which delays the ping until after you finish posting. The original site is down, but you can still find the mirror here: No-Ping-Wait plugin. Be careful if you use this plugin: do check that your blog is still pinging, as some people have reported that when they installed this plugin their blog stopped pining entirely, until the plugin was deactivated.

One way you can check to see if your blog is pinging Pingomatic is to check at Pingomation. Another way you can check to see if your blog is pinging is to use the Smart Update Pinger plugin. One of the things I like about this plugin is that it tells you whether or not a ping was succesful with each update service. Plus it IS compatible with the No-Ping-Wait plugin.

But the main purpose of the Smart Update Pinger plugin is to make sure that your blog only pings on new posts. WordPress will automatically ping every time you make a change to your posts, unless you have a plugin installed to change this pinging behaviour. And if you make changes to your posts, particularly if you make changes to a number of posts at one time, without a plugin like Smart Update Pinger, you risk being banned from the update services as a ping spammer!

One big minus for the Smart Update Pinger though, is that future posts and timestamped drafts will never be pinged at all. Definitely no good if you like to have drafts and future posts lined up in your WordPress admin to publish at a later date.

To have your future posts pinged, but only when they actually appear, you could stop using Smart Update Pinger and use WP-Cron-with-Future-Pings, which is part of the WP-Cron plugin package. But then, of course, you’re back to the problem of your blog pinging when posts are edited.

Post Schedule Ping Optimizer and PingFix are the plugins I’ve found that ping drafts and future posts only when they’re published, and also prevent pinging when a post is edited. If you’re going to use timestamped drafts or future posts, you really should get one of these plugins. Note that PingFix also needs the WP-Cron plugin. Up til now, I’ve been using Smart Update Pinger on this blog, but I’ve switched to PingFix, so that I have the option to use timestamped drafts and future posts.

Update services do change over time, and sometimes one service will run very slowly, and cause long delays in posting to your blog. If you only have one blog, you can play detective to identify the slow service, and delete it from your list. But what if you have multiple blogs to update? Then you should try WP-CentralPingList - a handy plugin that maintains one central ping list for all of your WordPress blogs.

After reading the WordPress compressed all inclusive ping list, I’ve decided to try out that ping list for now, as its short enough that I’m not bothered by the ping wait. If I want to make changes in the future, I’ll try WP-CentralPingList.

Finally there’s one plugin that I’m a bit confused about (call me technologically challenged!). The RSS AutoSubmit plugin automatically submits your blog to a list of RSS directories once a month. As far as I can see, a couple of these directories are already in pingomatic, so I assume this plugin is technically another kind of ping (but I could be wrong). I assume since it “submits your blog” that it is submitting the home page, rather than the latest post, so I guess its not really doubling up on your existing ping list. I figure this plugin adds just one more extra little boost, on top of your regular ping list.