The art of Pinging

The art of Pinging

An important part of growing your blog is making sure that the World Wide
Web knows your blog exists and knows when you publish new content.
Blogger helps you achieve this through its automatic pinging service in conjunction
with Weblogs.com.


In simplest terms, pinging is the process by which a signal is sent to a server
(called a ping server) whenever new content is added to a blog (or another
online source). Weblogs.com is a ping server that aggregates the pings
it receives and makes them available to third parties, such as the search
engines Technorati and Google. If you want your blog posts to appear in
search engine results, make sure your blog is set up to ping.

Blogger users can easily configure their blogs to ping Weblogs.com, the largest
and oldest ping server, as follows:


1. From the Blogger dashboard, click the Settings link

2. Choose Yes from the Let Search Engines Find Your Blog- dropdown
menu.

By selecting yes, your blog will automatically ping Weblogs.com and
Google Blog Search (an alternate ping server) every time you publish
new content, making it immediately available to search engines.

When you become more proficient with blogging, you might hear of other ping
servers and wonder whether you should manually ping them. Typically, the
answer is no. Weblogs.com — the largest ping server — is used by the major
search engines. Many other ping servers simply duplicate a portion of what
Weblogs.com does. Be sure to research other ping servers before you commit
to manually pinging them or add code to your blog to automatically ping them
to ensure it’s worth your time and effort.