Top Marketer FAQ – What is Pinging?

In the computer world, a “ping” can mean several things, but where it is used most frequently these days in the internet marketing world is when it associated with blogging. A ping is an XML-RPC mechanism that allows a blog to notify a server that it has updated content.

Most blog applications have a ping service built into the code or you can add additional ping services to the automation of the blog. Whenever you revise a blog post or add new content to your blog, the ping system sends out a message to the blog server that your blog has been updated.

This blog server then creates a list of blogs that have new content and makes it available to blog search engines so they can then go and crawl the updated sites and index the new content.

You can also submit pings manually to sites such as ping-o-matic or pingoat. These sites supply information to multiple ping servers and would cover the most popular sites. If you wanted, you can search out more of the independent servers who do not share their pings. For most, ping-o-matic is the server of choice to use as it shares with the largest number of blog servers and can be set up to ping automatically within your blogging application.

There are also “pingbacks”. If you have your blog set to receive pingbacks, your blog will receive a message any time another blog links to content within your blog. This can be beneficial to you if you want to keep track of who is publishing your content and providing links back to your site.