Did you know your WordPress pings a few services each time you publish something new on your website? Essentially, it is a good thing that WordPress does it automatically so you don’t have to worry about notifying the search engines and all other services that there is something new at your website.
This is a great news and this is one of the reasons WordPress is the #1 blogging platform in the world!
About Ping Services
Basically, a ping is a notification sent to search engines that new content has been added to your website. This is a kind of an invitation you send to the search engine bots to visit your blog.
Last year, I was doing my research and came across a post from Anna Hoffman of TrafficGenerationCafe.com titled “Has Google Pinged You as a Spammer?”. In this post, Anna explained all the ping services she uses for her blog. It is a resourceful post and I learned something important about ping spamming that I am going to share shortly. But first, let’s talk about ping services.
By default, WordPress comes configured to ping a service called ‘Ping-O-Matic’ and you can see that by visiting Settings > Writing > Update Services from your WordPress Admin dashboard. The entry will be like this:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
However, there are many blog directories and ping services which accept pings. So, when you add a new post in your blog, it is a good idea to send a ping to all these services so they can add your post into the directories/indexes as applicable and thus, it generates a backlink for you.
Therefore, just one ping service wasn’t good enough until last year. Now that ‘Ping-o-Matic’ has done a great job and it pings many other services for you automatically, you don’t have to worry about pinging too many services anymore. But based on my research and Anna’s recommendation as well, I have also added the following 3 services to my ping list:
If your blog doesn’t ping these services, it may be a good idea to add these services to your ping list as well. As of now, when 2013 is about to end, this ping list is good enough. That also means that, if you are having too many services listed in your ping list, it’s time to remove them except these. Many ping services are not taking your pings any more and many may have been changed or closed their services.
How Your Blog Could Become A Ping Spammer
Can your blog ping the ping services (or can you make it do so) too many times? Yes, it can happen. In fact, that is the whole idea behind this post.
By default, WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic on your blog. It’s intentional and it is good because, that is what we want. Don’t we?
But, if your blog pings too many times in a little while, search engines and other bookmarking services may ban your blog as a ping spammer. So, while pinging is a good thing, too many pings, too soon, is definitely not a good thing to happen for your blog.
Understanding WordPress Pinging Mechanism
WordPress is supposed to ping those services included in your ping services list (as discussed above) whenever a new post is published.
Now, before WordPress 3.1, there might have been a scenario where your blog would ping those services even when you edited a post or you scheduled bunch of future blog posts. Now, in such cases, if you edited a blog 30 times in a day and your WordPress pinged those services 30 times, your chances of getting banned from pinging as a ping spammer, were very high.
However, WordPress has come a long way and also, it is the number one CMS in the blogosphere. At least we need to trust WordPress guys that they would have fixed the problem (if it existed at all initially) now that WordPress 3.7 is out. Too much pinging is a serious problem and if WordPress continued to have this flaw consistently, it would quickly become a second grade CMS and people would have found something better to move out. Don’t you think?
As a matter of fact (and you can verify this through the WordPress forum which is pretty active), WordPress doesn’t send a ping to any service until you publish something. WordPress doesn’t ping any service on editing or scheduling or saving something in the draft. Therefore, your blog’s chances of being labeled as a ping spammer are pretty slim with the current versions of WordPress software. You can relax knowing that your blog is safe no matter how many times you edit or save your posts.
For more information on this, I can point to this detailed explanation of this mechanism by the author of the CBNET Ping Optimizer Plugin who explains why you don’t need to worry about the pinging problem anymore in WordPress.
Does Your WordPress Blog Need A Ping Optimizer Plugin
If WordPress had a pinging problem, we would need a plugin that would stop WordPress from pinging the services unnecessarily. But, with the understanding of the saving, editing and publishing process within WordPress (as explained above), there is no need for any such plugin.
Prior to knowing how WordPress handles these things, I used to have WordPress Ping Optimizer plugin although CBNET Ping Optimizer plugin was also on my radar and I used to recommend that to some of my friends.
Interestingly, I see that Anna (who used to recommend WordPress Ping Optimizer before) now recommends another plugin called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin. I am not sure why Anna continues to recommend that people add one more plugin to their blog, but I think that we should give some credit to WordPress and begin to trust that they wouldn’t let such a flaw exist in WordPress for so long.
I don’t use any ping optimizer plugin and I don’t recommend any of my clients and friends to have any ping optimizer plugin whatsoever. And I have not seen any negative (or positive) impact of not having a ping optimizer plugin on any of my sites.
But, if you would like to still have a plugin, you can choose any of the plugins I shared above. It isn’t going to hurt anything either (as long as the plugin is not having a bug or a conflict). Of course, adding a plugin is only going to increase the load on your server for no obvious benefit.
Over To You – Questions/Recommendations/Testimonials?
Do you use any Ping Optimizer Plugin on your WordPress blog? If yes, have you found any benefit/loss of using the plugin? Please share your story through your comments and add value.
If you don’t use any plugin for this purpose (or, if this is your first introduction to the concept of pinging), please share your thoughts or any questions that you may have about this. I would love to hear from you.
Thank you kindly!
Hi Kumar !
I’ve read on a few blogs that pinging too much to search engines for a single article to get indexed may penalize an entire blog.Hence, we should always avoid this tactic .Anyways , i’ve added those 3 URLs to my blog’s list of services to be pinged when i publish my next article.Thanks for sharing these URL’s with us.
-Pramod
Hi Pramod,
I also thought so initially and used a plugin for a long time. But I realized my mistake and decided to put my trust in WordPress core!
There is nothing to worry about and you don’t need a plugin anymore. WordPress team is smart and had qualified professionals making sure that this incredible CMS remains a favorite choice for bloggers!
Have a great day my friend!
Hi Kumar,
I was using the WP Ping Optimizer plug-in. You not only brought this to my attention, that the plug-in is no longer required, you had already removed the extra lines of code. No concern was necessary on my part because you had already looked after it. That is just one of the benefits of taking advantage of your hosting plan. Thank you!
Kind Regards,
Bill
You are very welcome, Bill. We add value to each other and this is how it should be.
You have helped me on many occasions and continue to help me with editing and I am grateful to you for that as always.
Have a wonderful week!
Hi Kumar,
From time to time I edit old articles even 30 times a day. So, before reading the whole article I said to myself, “OMG, Kumar, don’t tell me that I’m a spammer” 🙂
A side-note: you don’t need any ping service to have your site indexed by Google. Google is way smarter than it was some years ago, and still Google wasn’t dumb at all at that time. Those indexing things are SEO myths.
Since quite many years if you share one single blog post on a high traffic forum (in your sig line) Googlebot will visit the site quickly. More recently… share a blog post on G+ and whether you want it or not Googlebot will pay a visit. What’s the point? Well.., you don’t need to do almost anything to have your site indexed.
And finally… even more recently… Google indexes sites without you doing absolutely anything. Real story…
Two years ago (not that recent though) I registered a domain name that was never registered before. I’m 100% sure about that. I’ve worked online on designing it (it wasn’t a blog) and of course that not being finished I didn’t promote it in any way. However, suddenly… after a few days a friend told me, “Are you nuts? I’ve just found your unfinished site in Google. Why did you do that?”
I didn’t do anything, I’m not stupid to promote a site that isn’t ready for visitors’ eyes. Then I tried to find out why did that happen… Guess why? Googlebot found my domain name on registrar’s site.
Me 🙂
P.S. Disclaimer – The point of this long side note isn’t to tell you not to use anymore ping services, but to tell you that you don’t need any ping service in order to have your site indexed by a major search engine.
Point taken sir! And it is taken very well. Thank you for sharing your experience and I’m sure it gives hope to many who have not known about these things till now. At least they will know that they are okay 🙂
Thank you for adding a tremendous value through your own story!
Have a wonderful week!
Hi Kumar,
That surely was a very informative post 🙂
Oh no…I also don’t use any Ping Optimizer Plugin on my blog and don’t feel the need to use them either, for the very reasons you mentioned. I think if you are on a WordPress blog, that in itself is self-sufficient and you really don’t need any more plugin.
I liked the 3 ping services you mentioned, and while I already use one of these, I need to add the other two – or shall I say replace them with the ones I have. I have 2 other than the ones mentioned. I wonder how one can make out which is the best or the right one to use because there are so many sites saying so many different things, and how many are too many to be called as spammin. Glad you gave us Ana’s link…I think I missed that post being on my summer vacation break shall look it up soon after here.
Thanks once again for sharing this with us. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
You already are doing so good and may be you don’t need to worry about the service list since you already have some listed.
Based on Anna’s list and a few other credible sources, I came to the conclusion that these 3 services are good for now.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking time to share them Harleena.
Have a great week!
Hi Kumar,
I don’t even know if I have a ping optimizer on my blog. Sounds silly right? But I do have a service that takes care of all that stuff, especially when WordPress updates. So you see, I’m totally ignorant on this subject.
But alas…I found out what a ping is and how it works. The one thing I do know is that my husband always tells me NOT to fool around and change things on my post when it is up. He does all that “brain work for me thank God”
I do all my editing on a word document, copy and paste it to my blog in the back office. Then I post my picture and a video if necessary before I publish. Then…I leave it alone! Except when someone kind (like you) will catch something and let me know …like something in the post that was a duplicate)
So, my question to you is Am I safe?
Thanks Kumar!
-Donna
Yes mam! You are so completely safe. WordPress is protecting you well and you’ve nothing to worry about from pinging standpoint 🙂
Happy blogging 🙂
Hello Gauraw,
I am not using any ping optimizer plugin for my WordPress blog. I have already added some ping urls in my WordPress blog and whenever a new post publish my blog automatically send updates to Google…
Hi Himanshu,
That’s a great thing that you have done. You are therefore, doing great 🙂
Good luck to you and let me know if I can help you with anything.
Thanks,
Kumar
Excellent article and explanation Kumar! I have done a tone of research on this topic and read the same article from Anna that you did. It was good to see that I was using the same ping services.
It was fascinating to me to hear that there even was such a thing as ping spam when I first began researching the topic. I guess there are those that will always exploit something, no matter the area.
Yes, you are so right Rebekah! I guess I fell for ping optimizer for a log time even though now we are on WP 3.7.
But it’s better late than never and I wanted to make sure I get the word out on this through my platform.
Hope it helps a few people who may still be stuffing their blogs with plugins like this knowing not if they really need them.
Have a great week!
Hi Kumar!
I have never bothered about any ping optimizer neither have I added any ping service apart from the default pingomatic.
Why?
WordPress is a properly developed CMS that I trust. It would not be wise adding a lot of piging services. Your chances are simply high being marked as spam especially for blogs which update frequently.
Do have a nice day, Kumar…and thanks for sharing!
– Terungwa
Hi Terungwa,
Good thing that you didn’t get influenced with all the buzz around about the ping spamming and didn’t pay attention to these unnecessary plugins 🙂
I paid attention, used them for a while and then realized that WordPress should get a bit more credit than we give and removed those to lighten up my website. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Regards,
Kumar
Hey Kumar,
this reminded of the ping optimizer I have… I actually deactivated it when I was having those malware problems on my blog. But you know what, I haven’t activated and haven’t had any pinging problems! I guess having wordpress 3.7 helps a lot to minimize the pinging! Thanks for sharing!
That’s right Sherman! WordPress 3.7 does help a lot and we can focus on business knowing that WordPress is taking care of these trivial issues for us silently.
Have a successful week!
Kumar,
so here it is something that I have no idea what it is.. ho yes, I tread your article, I read othe r people information about this “ping optimizer” but so far, I have no idea what it is or what it does or how to get it anyway..
Thanks to your support, I found out that I need a professional like you to manage my WP.. and from this article, I can see that the need is more clear haha 🙂
Ho yes, I am thinking of it as I mentioned to you.. but so far did not get there…
Thanks so much as usual for all your support you share for all to benefit…
_nickc
No worries Nick! You are doing a great job with what you know and that’s very important!
There is always more to learn and then there are professionals there to help out where there is a need.
When your business grows and when you do realize that you don’t want to deal with these issues and maintenance tasks on a daily basis, we come in.
Whenever you are ready for it, we will welcome you to our Managed WordPress hosting service and take your worries away from you 🙂
Have a great week!
Hi Kumar,
I’m not using any other plugins than the one in WP. I know that there is something that prevent my blog post from being ping over and over if I edit my blog more than once in a day, but I can’t remember what it is now 🙂
Do you manually post your blog post on the 3 pings you mentioned here or are they plugins?
I tend to be allergic to anything technical, but I know that I need to know and do some.
Thanks for this educational post.
Hi Sylviane,
The three URLs I mentioned to be placed into your ping services list, are just 3 new entries I suggested you could make in your ping list by going into your Setting -> Writing menu item. You already may have an entry for pingomatic in there. So, you are good as you are right now I believe. It doesn’t hurt to have them added if you don’t have these three. However, if you don’t understand these, you can simply ignore my suggestion and you will still be good.
Actually, the objective of my post is that you don’t need to do anything about it 🙂 If you don’t know anything about it, good! No action required at your end 🙂
Have a successful week 🙂
Regards,
Kumar
Hey Kumar,
I use to use MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer awhile back but since I have CommentLuv Premium, Andy added that particular function so it would be one less plugin we would need. I think you know how I am with plugins so I’m happy to say I got rid of that I don’t know, maybe two years ago.
I’m glad though that WordPress decided to implement this feature finally because although it’s rare I go back in and fix something after it’s been published I have been known to on an occasion and would really freak out if I was ever accused of abusing this in anyway through the search engines.
I only use a few pinging services as well. Most of the ones I used in the past vanished off the face of the earth anyway. They tend to just go away after awhile.
I’m sure plenty of people will be eager to learn this so thanks for sharing it. I wrote about pinging probably two or three years ago now. My goodness, it’s been a long time.
Have a good week.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne,
Thanks for the update. I did not know that CommentLuv had this feature built within.
Anyways, we don’t even need that because WordPress has gotten smarter 🙂
Even then, CommentLuvers have no worries whatsoever! Have a great day!
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
I was unaware of the ping services that WordPress had built in. I personally submit my articles on webmaster tools via fetch as google when I post something new, but other than that I don’t really submit them anywhere else at the moment. I will definitely have to check out those sites you listed above. Thanks for sharing man.
Josh May
Hi Josh,
If you are on WordPress, you don’t need to do Webmaster Tools fetch. That doesn’t help anyway.
WordPress, by default calls rpc ping services of pingomatic and does a great job. If you don’t do anything, WordPress is doing it for you already. So relax knowing that you are being taken care of 🙂
Happy blogging and all the best to you!
~Kumar
Hello,
Informative post Kumar, Yes i do use Ping Optimizer Plugin for my wordpress blog and I’m aware that every time when we edit our posts it will automatically ping all the services. I think i read it on blog(I really forgotten the blog’s name)that there is a plugin to ping the post only once when we wanted or for fresh posts.
Thanks for the share.
Hi Kumar,
good to have confirmation on this issue.
A while back the cbnet pingoptimizer plugin creator announced that the plugin was no longer needed.
Now I understand why, thanks to you post.
Recently I came across a post that suggested to add a list of services to the pinglist and the list of services was on the WordPress site.
What are your thought on that?
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!
Cheers,
Yorinda
Hi Yorinda,
The list of ping services on the WordPress.org is very detailed but only God knows how frequently that list is updated because they do not provide an updates date there. So, I will not use that list and use it for knowledge purposes only.
Happy Thanksgiving week to you 🙂
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Actually, I dislike the idea of pinging plugin in WordPress. Basically, it will do some ping to any of ping services, won’t it? If we do that, there’s some unnatural of our site’s development and any search engines, especially Google doesn’t like any suspicious activities. Just one ping service is enough to get know any search engine that we have update in my opinion… 🙂
Hi Meisha,
Good to hear from you again! Happy Thanksgiving to you 🙂
Yes, you are right. WordPress already does the pinging. But the idea here is that people complain that WordPress pings too many times. However, that isn’t true.
So, people use plugins to stop WordPress from pinging to many times. Anyway, that isn’t a problem anymore after WordPress 3 came. So, those plugins become irrelevant today.
Have a great day!
Hi Kumar,
I agree wit you entirely. Some months ago there was a debate in the blogosphere about this. I did a lot of research and found a huge number of posts with panicked people who shouted : “Hey !!! WordPress pings anything. Take care!! ”
I also found a small number of articles that were against this point of view. Those articles were written by professionals, developers, programmers, coders. They analyzed the WordPress code and discovered that it doesn’t ping each time you edit a post or schedule a post. WordPress is smarter than that. They even presented and discussed those WordPress functions. I believed them.
Unfortunately, the herd was impossible to convince. A lot of people that do not have technical knowledge and do not understand coding were frightened. As far as I were able to see, that huge mass of WordPress users was made of people who were afraid of everything: Google, WordPress or even their own shadow.
I think Ana’s article was especially targeted to those people. I think she tried to appease them somehow, to make them feel more confortable when editing a post. She gave a solution to the problem and people felt safe.
You are so right when you said : “if WordPress continued to have this flaw consistently, it would quickly become a second grade CMS and people would have found something better to move out.”
The whole thing was hype from the beginning. Even at that time I laughed when I saw those posts. Just imagine: You open your blog – Ping!; Add a new post as a draft – Ping! ; write a paragraph – Ping! ; save the post – Ping! ; add a picture – Ping! ; write another paragraph – Ping!; put a link – Ping! ; schedule the post – Ping!
I think this is a well written post that shows moderation and equilibrium. Well done Kumar!
Have a wonderful day
Hi Kumar,
This is my first time being on your blog and its actually from Sue Bride blog that I came across this post.
Honestly, I have been thinking of adding more ping services to the default one set up by wordpress, however, with your recommendation, I’d just make use of those three you’ve mentioned.
Thanks friend for such a wonderful tutorial.
I used to use ping services in the old days but not any more. I am relieved to find out that no pings are sent on edits as I often do that at least once after publishing. Forgetting to add a feature images is usually the cause of it.
Would you recommend using a ping service if you are updating an old post? A plugin would not be needed for this but you could use something like pingoat.
Yes Sue, you should ping if you are editing an old post and you can do that without using a plugin. Ping-O-Matic also has a web based pinging service! Or you can use any other service that you like. It doesn’t matter. But yes, you should ping after making changes manually when you think it’s time.
Regards,
Kumar
Hi there, I am slightly confused… Should we have a Ping list now, or not? I get that we don’t need the plugin anymore,but should we still ping or not? Very interesting post! 🙂
Hy gauraw..this is very good informatio for me.I phase this problem many time when I commenting on some blogs..thank u so much for giving very good knowledge about wordPress..