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I have read some posts on adult webmaster boards recently on the fear that some adult webmasters have about “pinging” their blog.

If you do not know what a “ping” is, click here for the Wikpedia article on “pinging”.

If you do know what pining is and are somehow fearful of pinging your adult blog as you update, it is time to put that notion to rest.

First of all, pinging is an intentional service intended to allow Search Engines to access and provide results for fresh content that is published in the blog format.  It is specific to “blogs” because of their decidedly “news” and “opinion” orientation and bias in format of the publishing mechanism.

If you doubt that it is the intention of blog pinging services to wish to be let known of blog updates, following is a quote from the Google page introducing their blog pinging service:

“Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We’ll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community. Read more at our FAQ. “ 

This was published on this Google page in 2006.

Furthermore, pinging allows your new site to be indexed faster (I have put some blogs up on new domains that went from grey bar to a PR 0 in a matter of hours).  It will also bring fresh traffic to new posts. 

But, all webmasters, particularly adult webmasters, need to be concerned about being identified as a “ping spammer”.  Because there should be concern, however, does not mean or imply that one should not ping their updates…

Ping spam is something that every blog, adult or not, should be aware of.  In essence, ping spam is the attempt to ping pages or content that is neither fresh or recent.  In other words, pinging old pages/posts withing your blog or repeatedly pinging the same content.  This could get your blog identified and penalized as a ping spammer.

Adult blogs need to be particularly cognizant of this particular issue.  We all know that by the nature of their keywords, adult sites in general are more carefully parsed in the search engine algorithms because they are all by default labeled as potentially “members of a bad neighborhood” to use Google’s own terms.  None of that means, however, that adult blogs should be any more fearful of pinging their new posts and pages than any mainstream blogger.

What it does mean, from the very initiation of your blog, that you need to be more careful about pinging existing pages or stale content.  In fact, by the very nature of their offering the service in the first place, the search engines want you to ping them.

So, what do I mean by being careful to avoid “ping spam”?

Generally, you need to follow some basic and commonsensical guidelines:

• Do not ping when you are setting up your blog other than the initial ping when you bring the software (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) live.
• Do not ping older content, particularly if it has already been pinged.
• Do not ping back posts.  Doing back posts is fine if you are simply trying to add content for your users.  Do not risk pinging such content as the search engine will wonder which existing page it came from and may conclude you are pinging duplicate content.  If you are transfering older posts from a different platform (Drupal to Wordpress for example) and need to tell the search engines the new url, use redirection codes (we recommend only using .htaccess 301 redirection for this purpose).
• Do not allow your posts to be pinged when you are editing them.  Wordpress, by default, will ping the services each time you edit a post.
• Make sure your future posts are getting pinged when published.  Wordpress and other platforms do not necessarily do this.  In other words, if you make posts to be published in the future by changing the time-stamp, make certain they are pinged when actually published and only when actually published.

So, now that the rules are established, how do you accomplish this?

I am going to answer this starting from you initiation of your new blog on a new domain and assume you are using Wordpress.  If you are using another blogging platform, do the same things in the areas that allow you to accomplish the same things:

1. First, upon logging into Wordpress the first time, and changing your other settings and passwords to your normal settings, go to Settings >> Writing  and delete the update services until you have a change to get your blog up and operating and publishable.

2. Second, install the Ultimate Updates Smart Pinger.  If you have followed the guidelines I published in Essential Plugins for Adult Blogs, you would already have installed this handy plugin.  If, however, you have not, do so immediately.

3. Once you have installed and activated the Smart Pinger Plugin, go to Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  You will see a page like the following…

Once you are on this page, there are only a couple of things you must intially do.  Until your blog pages and theme are ready to begin publishing, leave the checkbox to enable pinging unchecked (you will check it when you are ready to publish). 

You also should have received a list of pinging services in the folder from your download named update-services.txt.  Copy the update services from this text file and paste into the text box on the Smart Pinger Page.  Do not about the update services box on the default Wordpress page to list update services.  The Smart Pinger will override that setting – which you have left blank.

Pre-Publication Settings for Smart Pinger

 4. Now, you are ready to configure your theme, test posts, and test css styles on your theme without pinging anyone. 

5. Prepare your first page (s) and post (s) and save in draft form. 

6. If you are backdating some posts or transferring posts over from another platform that will now have a new url, publish them now.  This is very important to avoid any sort of spam labeling.  Again, for posts that have moved or have a new url, prepare an .htaccess 301 redirection and upload it to your root.

7. Once you have your new blog site configured and ready to go and have prepared your first page (s) and posts but prior to publishing anything, go back to the Ultimate Plugins Smart Pinger configuration page Settings >> UP Smart Pinger.  Put a check in the tick box labeled “Enable Pinging”, save changes, and now you are ready to publish.

Enable Smart Pinger

8. Publish your new pages and posts.  If this is a brand spanking new blog, this is all you need to do.

Assuming you make no additional changes to your blog’s theme or css, that is all you need to worry about.  The Smart Pinger Plug in will do the following: 

1. Ping services only when a new post is created, not when a post is updated
2. Ping services for future posts only when the post appears on your blog
3. Provide you with a detailed overview of each ping operation the plugin makes
4. Provide you with a “ping now” functionality
5. Check if a service supports extended or normal pings and ping accordingly
6. Use the new URL instead of just the homepage URL to ping, resulting in a much higher quality ping (extended pings) 

In other words, each time you make a new post or add a new page, the plugin will ping services that notify all of the major search engines and blog directories of your update.  If you have used their list of ping services, you will not be duplicating pings, pinging duplicate content, generating redundant pings or any other spam type of pinging. 

You will, however, get all the benefit from pinging that everyone in the mainstream does without being labeled a spammer.

As a side note to non-Wordpress users, you need to make sure to enable your blog platform to do the following things:

1.  Do not allow your platform to ping on edits, back dated content or duplicate content.

2.  Make sure that the platform blogs your future posts when they are published.

3. Make certain you are not pining posts as you edit them.

You can handle these tasks manually by turning off the pinging feature of you platform and then pinging only the following services each time you update so as not to ping the same service multiple times (List effective as of 03/18/09): 

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

The reason you restrict your list to these services is that some of them, most famously pingomatic, already ping other services such as Google.  Multiple pinging of the same content will get you banned.  To be safe, ping only the url of the new post/page although mainstream folks will ping the main page of their blog and the post/page url.  Only ping new content.

One final note is that we highly recommend that you also use this plugin with the All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress.

So, ping away without fear sisters and brothers.  There is no reason you should not benefit from this service without being banned or penalized by any search service.

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