Business Blogging Tips – What The Heck is a Ping List?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve cobbled together a decent “ping list” that I include in every blog installation. What’s a ping list, you ask?

To know what a ping list is, you need to know what a ping is. Generally speaking, a ping is one computer asking another “Can you hear me now?” to make sure the connection between the two is active. When it comes to blogs, pings are designed to alert other computers to new blog posts.

Put another way: If the Internet were a small village, a “ping” would be the equivalent of ringing the bell at the main church in town. “Pings” are designed to draw attention to your blog.

When your blog sends out a ping to other computers, these computers (known as servers) respond by sending over a “bot” (bot is short for robot, also known as a web crawler or a spider). The bot will read and record the contents of your new blog post and then share all or part of your post with the rest of the world.

This process of reading and recording is known as “indexing” in the world of SEO (very important term).

SO, a “ping list” is a list of websites that will accept pings, a.k.a. a list of ping servers. Ping servers are also known as update services.

The main benefit to using a list of ping servers is that you increase the likelihood your blog post will get indexed quickly - quick indexing is obviously nice if you’re blogging about something newsworthy.

Now that you know what pings, ping servers, and ping lists are, here’s our recommended ping list (right-click and “save target as” to download the text file).

If you have a blog powered by Wordpress, here’s how you can use this list:

The crude illustration above shows you where you can find the “writing” settings for your blog.

1. Download our ping list above, open it using Notepad (or similar) and copy all the addresses (select all, then right click).

2. Login to your blog’s dashboard, expand the “Settings” menu, and click on “Writing” (see above).

3. When the writing settings page opens up, scroll down to Update Services. You’ll see a big empty text box with one ping server listed (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/).

4. Click inside the text box below “Update Service,” right click and select “Paste.”

5. Save the new settings.

Now, whenever you publish a new blog post, 34 ping servers will be notified (instead of just 1). Isn’t technology wonderful?