Archives for December 2006

Last updated on December 4, 2007

Click here to read Part I of How “Blog-and-Ping” Can Boost Your PageRank.

How “Blog-and-Ping” Can Boost Your PageRank – Part II
The Ping List – Making Google Your Little “Bee-yaach”

Here’s a list of URL’s that I have in this very WordPress-driven blog (log in as admin and go to Options > Writing > (Scroll down to) Update Services). Every time I “Publish” a post, WordPress automatically saves the entry first, and then pings each of these URL’s in succession, until it has gotten back a (successful, or a ‘time-out’) response from each one, and then redirects to your “Manage” page.

Pinging all these URL’s can be very slow and take about 5 minutes, so don’t freak out and hit ‘cancel’ or close the browser window, as that will stop the pinging from completing.

Store this ping list online (I use both Yahoo Notepad (primary) and Google Notebook for storing such notes) and save it in the “Update Services” section of your blog setup only when you “publish” a new post. Once you’re done publishing, remember to remove the list from your blog setup and save the change.

Here’s why: Once you have “published” a post, if you still let the ping list remain in your blog setup, then every time you make a change to any published post, WordPress will once again ping all of the URL’s listed.

So, if you make multiple posts a day, or go back to an older post and make some edits, make sure you are pinging only once or twice a day by selectively adding and removing the ping-list from your blog setup. Ping any more than that, and you may get banned by the service for abusing the privilege.

Pinging Google
You cannot ping Google using this ping list.

If you want to ping Google about changes to your blog, then use the Google Sitemap Plugin for WordPress using which you can create an xml file with your blog posts, and ping Google. Of course, you need to have signed up for Google Sitemap first and added your blog to your account.

However, if you are just making changes to your web site (if not the same as your WordPress or Typepad “blog”), then use the Google Sitemap tool for regular web sites to create your sitemap xml file and also ping Google.

So here’s the ping list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

Remember, all it takes is one ping a day to get Google to come crawling your web site, and in fact pinging these other services alone can make Google follow links to your post from these third-party sites, and come to your site. So, use Blog-and-Ping with caution, and the Googlebot will become your little “bee-yaach” 😉

– Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

“Blog and Ping” is a term that refers to a technique where you make a post on your blog, and using your blog software’s in-built feature, you then send out a “ping” to various blog directories, notifying them that you have added a new post to your blog.

A “ping” is a way of notifying various blog directories and blog search engines, in an industry standard way, that you have just made a post on your blog. This is nothing but a signal sent from your blog (pinger) to the target directory (or aggregator service) that you are actually pinging (the pingee), and this signal contains the URL of your post. Following this, the pingee picks up the URL and content from your post, and when someone on that site searches for keywords contained in your post, then your post shows up in their search results.

Search engines (especially Google) love blogs, because blogs are full of “useful” content (at least they are supposed to be). The more active your site is – in terms of frequent, new content – the better your ranking will be.

In November 2006, I personally noticed one of my main sites suddenly drop a few places from position #2 to #8 in Google’s SERP (search engine results pages). Now Google sends me about 80% of my total traffic to this site, and as soon as my site dropped to #8, it went “below the fold” (meaning, out of the view of the first part of the results page that appears when you do a search, and the only way to see it is to scroll down a little). And I immediately saw my Adsense earnings drop about 80%!

Sidebar: That just goes to show you that even having a “top 10” listing on Google (or any search engine for that matter) is no good, because not many would search beyond the first 2-3 web sites, especially if the top 2-3 sites give the user what they are looking for, or lead them on to other things from there so the user never comes back to Google to look further down

I wasn’t sure what caused this to happen, but I quickly made some modifications to the site, moved some stuff around, published some new content on my blog, pinged all directories I am aware of, removed some external links that I suspected might have triggered some Google-spam-filter, and also used Google’s SiteMap tool to ping Google of my changes, and within 48 hours, my site was back to position #2. God bless Google!

So, the concept of pinging is a pro-active way of letting other sites know that you have made some changes on your site or blog.

Especially with Google, when you ping Google using the sitemap tool, you can see how quickly Googlebot (Google’s spider) comes knocking. This is especially useful in situations like my scare-scenario above, where I hurriedly made some changes, wanted Google to know right away that I had indeed made some changes, and wanted my changes to be considered when calculating my ranking the next time around.

That is exactly what Google did – it liked my changes, and/or just the fact that I had made some changes, so got brownie points for being a “good publisher”, and gave me my Adsense earnings back.

Moral of the story: Never fudge with Google – not if you are making any money at all from Adsense.

Be a “Good publisher”, publish often, publish white-hat, build good, quality content, and The Google will reward you with gold and adsense dollars.

– Ravi Jayagopal / WebmasterInABox.net

Something’s going on with Google Video.

Every visit to my various WordPress blogs was freezing up my browser (both Firefox and IE), and the last visible message on the frozen browser window’s status bar on all blogs was “loading from video.google.com…”.

I removed all Google video embeds in my various blogs, and all of them work fine now. I did leave all YouTube videos as is, as those seem to be loading up just fine. So, it’s just Google Videos.

Is Google trying to migrate all its videos to YouTube?

– Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com