In fact, if you have been using WordPress for a long time then by now your blog probably has been banned from ping services and you don't even know it. Read below to learn how some major flaws in WordPress's pinging system can get your blog banned and make it lose precious traffic. Answer these questions: * Why are blogs more powerful than ordinary websites? * Why do search engine easily index blogs while other websites struggle to get indexed? * Why do blogs attract more traffic than ordinary websites? The answer is the blog's ability to PING. Its not just a geeky term. Its a lot more powerful tool and process than you have imagined. "Whenever a blog pings, many background processes happen which get your blog quickly indexed by search engines as well as bringing traffic from many other sources." There are many blog directories and ping services which accept pings. When you add a new post in your blog, it sends a ping to all these websites saying, "Hey, I've just added a new post in my blog". And that's when magical things happen: * Some of those websites add your blog in their directory giving you a one way link. * Some of those websites list your blog in their recently updated blog list. * Search engines quickly come to your blog, index it and start sending traffic. * Blog search engines like Google Blog Search, Yahoo Search Blog, etc... also crawl and index your blog which in turn send additional traffic. * People visiting those blog directories see your blog there and come to your blog. * Blogrolling scripts like blogrolling.com and WordPress check update services to see if you've updated and then they reflect that on everyone's site, usually by moving you to the top of people's blogrolling list or putting a recently updated indicator by your link. * Services like Technorati (http://technorati.com) spider your links to tell who is linking to you and who you're linking to, almost in real time. If you show up on someone's Technorati link list for their site (often called an "egorati search") they're likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure. * Other sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs list the most recently updated blogs and many people browse these to find something new when they're bored. Isn't this pinging service a dream come true for the webmasters? You have seen numerous advantages of using ping but this same ping can work against you if you don't use it properly. Unfortunately, because of a serious flaw in WordPress's pinging system you are already using ping in the wrong way, without even realizing it. If you are using WordPress the way it is provided then it's very possible that by now your blog has been banned from many ping services because of ping spamming. Horrible isn't it? But it's true. "Why it's very risky to run WordPress in its current form" By default WordPress pings whenever you post a new topic in your blog. That's fine and that's what we want. But do you know WordPress also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post? If you edit a post 10 times then WordPress will send 10 pings. It doesn't matter how small or big a change you make, WordPress always pings whenever you edit. IT'S VERY DANGEROUS and if you edit your blog a lot then your blog will be banned from ping services because of excessive pinging. While pinging there's no way to show which post has been updated. The ping command always sends the home page link of the blog. So, it's simply useless and actually harms your blog if you ping whenever you update any existing post. Notes: This problem has not been fixed even in the latest version of WordPress 2.3. "Scheduling future posts in WordPress can put your blog in trouble and give ping services all the reason to ban your blog" WordPress has a nice feature of editing the time stamp from which you can schedule the post so that it gets published on any date in future. Time stamp You may be already using this nice feature for automatically updating your blog. But you may not know that scheduling future posts in that way will actually irritate ping services and your blog will quickly get banned from the ping services. Let me illustrate more clearly with an example why scheduling future posts can ban your blog: Say you are going for a vacation for 30 days and you want to schedule 30 posts so that your blog gets updated daily. You schedule 30 posts by editing the time stamp. Here when you post 30 posts, WordPress sends 30 pings even though that post haven't yet appeared in your blog. After that, for 30 days WordPress won't send a single ping, even though new posts appear in your blog. Note: This future pinging problem has been fixed since WordPress 2.1 but the pinging problem with editing post has not been fixed yet. You can see WordPress pings when there's no need risking having your blog banned and it didn't ping when pinging is really needed. The older plugins have stopped working for WordPress 2.1 and above In WordPress 2.1 there was a dramatic change in pinging codes due to which all the previous plugins which promised to solve the pinging problem have stopped working. All these plugins don't work anymore: * Smart Update Pinger * Ping Fix * WP Cron Future Ping Now, what's the solution for all these problems? Is there any way to make the WordPress pinging function work in the right way? Of course there is a solution: The Solution: MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Plugin "MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin" corrects WordPress's pinging system and solves all the problems listed above for even the latest version of WordPress " After you install it: * When you create a new post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly. * When you edit an existing post, it won't send an unnecessary ping to ping services and saves your blog from getting banned. * When you post a future post by editing the time stamp, it will ping only when your post appears in future. It won't unnecessarily ping many times when you schedule posts as WordPress does by default.
I also use Smart Update Pinger (don't have the link available, but you can search google). Seems to work well for me.
Hi imaginos thanks for sharing your view. i had read this article on the net so i thought some new bloggers like me, may use this article
good plugin but.... I did not like having to register the plugin and submit my email address to the autoresponder..sorry... I will just manually unclick the "ping" option on the right hand side of the post box whenever I edit a post
The biggest problem, the way I see it, is when Google Ping Services would ban a blog site. I can sleep whole night with the fact that all Ping Services have banned my Wordpress site, but I think I would become insomniac if Google will start hating my site.
The thing is all of us at some time accidentally edit our WP posts with ping activated...I would think there is some latitude there and I don't think it's as big of a problem as the OP would have you think. I think ping services should be more concerned with pingback spam that's occuring daily because of content scrapers. Having an updated version of Akismet usually solves that problem, by the way. Anyway, I have done some research and there are no other similar plugins at the moment that are compatible with the newest versions of WP other than the OP's. So it is your choice as to whether or not you want to register and submit an email address to use the plugin.
Smart Update Pinger isn't compatible with WP 2.1 and up. The author, Christian Davén, even states on his website that he will not be updating his plugin anymore. Unfortunately I never knew this all the time I had SUP. I'm pretty sure I am banned from technorati and probably other ping services as well. I did download the newer version of SUP entitled Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger. It's by a different author who updated SUP himself. I haven't noticed being unbanned by Technorati yet. Supposedly after a given time they will unban you, just as long as the pings aren't as frequent. But I don't know how long this takes... I'm tempted to download this new MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Plugin, but if you look at the comments on the download page, it doesn't exactly give you a hopeful feeling. I will probably try it out nonetheless. Because this new SUP version times out and gives me a dead page when I click "Post". The previous version did that too. WP should just fix this issue themselves and have it built in. Maybe it will in 2.5?
I'll try it out. Thanks techleach! I downloaded PingFix, but like you said it doesn't work for the 2.3.3. WordPress.