What Does “Pinging a Site” Do?

By Albert
In Blogging
10/06/09 at 15:59
0 Comments

What Does “Pinging a Site” Do?

Okay, so what is pinging? You have probably heard of webmasters say, “I’ve got to ping my site” or ask, “Should I ping my site?” So, what is pinging and what does it really do? Lets take a look in the dictionary.

ping

[ping] Show IPA

–verb (used without object)

1.	to produce a sharp sound like that of a bullet striking a sheet of metal.

–noun

2.	a pinging sound.

Okay, maybe the definition of pinging isn’t exactly what webmasters are referring to, but pinging basically means that you are trying to notify sites that you made a change on a website that doesn’t have to be yours particularly.

Why webmasters mention this? It is most likely to be link building related which has to do with search engine optimization. Pinging simply gives a nudge to search engines like Google that your site has made an update, and will probably help to get your site indexed faster, although it isn’t 100%.

Some Situations You May Want to Ping

You got a quality backlink from an out of date site.
You want to rank for a keyword “quicker” than other sites.
You just like to ping because you like seeing some productive work done without you having to do anything.

Some Common Myths of “Pinging”

Q: Does pinging frequently help improve my site’s traffic?

A: Pinging does not really have any power on whether or not it will improve a site’s traffic performance, all it does is what it designed to do – notify sites about new updates and speed up the process. (Most site platforms already have autopinging configurations installed, so it isn’t really necessary, unless you really have to.)

Q: Does pinging give your site more superiority in ranking in the search engines?

A: I believe what webmasters are trying to say is that are webmasters that ping before other webmasters, have an upper hand just because the search engines found their sites first? The answer, is no, Google only ranks by the effort you put into link building and ranks your site accordingly to your site’s efforts of being search engine optimized as well. They don’t look at who wrote this first or whatever, they simply look for the most qualifying sites, that have nothing correlated to pinging what so ever.