Each and every time you make a new blog post WordPress helps you spread the good news by contacting ping services. A ping is basically a way for a website to notify a ping server of new content, the ping server may in turn contact search engines, website directories, news websites, aggregators, RSS feed websites and many other content indexing services.
All WordPress installs use the same one service by default, that’s an estimated 75 million websites worldwide that use this one ping service by default.
Going the extra mile
Some argue that WordPress ping services are pointless or of little real value anyway but from my experience with SEO and web development in general it’s often many small steps put together that make the difference. Imagine having the top search result for your niche compared to the second search result. It’s a small step but it could make a massive difference to your blog or business.
I’m not saying that ping services in WordPress will make that much of a difference but each little step can add up. As this is a once off task which is then done automatically each time a new WordPress post is born I think it’s a great idea to use ping services with WordPress and using more than one is even better!
Adding extra ping services in WordPress
It’s very easy to add extra ping services to WordPress, in the administrative section of your WordPress website (wp-admin) select Settings and then Writing.
Scrolling to the bottom of the page reveals a text area labelled Update Services. Copy the text in this text file wordpress-ping-service-list.txt and paste it into the Update Services text area.
Then click Save Changes and the job is done.
You’ve now added 290 ping services and each of these will be contacted by your website each and every time you write a new post on your blog. The original ping service is included in this list but at any time you can revert to only using the default ping service by deleting all the services except the following one.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/Ping services in WordPress are not the same as backlinks so you won’t be penalised by for creating too many or low quality like you would with backlinks. Just remember that each time you create a new post your website will need to contact each of these services so don’t have a crazy long list. This list of less than 300 should be more than enough to make sure your post gets all the attention it deserves.
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