Your Blog’s Ping - Can You Hear It?

Posted on June 3, 2005

The earlier info about pinging every blog post created quite a flurry of emails and comments.

Made me wonder…perhaps not everyone knows this stuff already.

So let’s talk about it some…

There are many blog services and software and there’s no way I can cover them all, but I will talk about the top three - Google’s blogger (blogspot.com blogs), WordPress and MovableType.

It pains me to write this because so many readers are using ‘blogger’ blogs, but it is the least powerful and least editable of the three and I have serious concerns about the free service now more than ever.

I’ve aggravated some people in the past by speaking my mind and gazing into my crystal ball, so I’ll climb out on a limb again with my thoughts…

Please, if you are running your business using a blogspot hosted blog, start moving out now. Grab a domain name for under $5, a hosting account for less than $5/month, and rebuild that blog on your own domain. Spam blogs are populating the blogspot sphere and less and less credibility is being given to blogs hosted there - by the search engines and by visitors who actually look at urls.

Yes, I do have a few blogger blogs myself but they are not my flagship blogs, they are my testing beds, my research spaces, my aggregators, and I expect little from them other than to boost my page rank a bit and send me the odd visitor…This is too detailed to describe here, just take my word for it, if you’re serious about your blog then give it a home of it’s own.

Here’s what I see…

7 years or so ago when you did a search in yahoo all kinds of freeyellow and homestead and other free hosting sites would come up in the results. Remember back when everyone and his brother had a website with these ‘free’ pages? AND the darn things got hits and visitors and were listed in the search engines! They are all still there - but when was the last time you saw them show up in a search engine listing? Free is fun, but it isn’t always best in the long run.

I’m running out of time today, but I’ll finish off this post regarding Pinging and Blogger blogs first…

  1. Blogspot hosted blogs only ping weblogs.com when you add a new posts.
  2. Blogspot hosted blogs have the ping command turned off by default!
  3. Blogspot hosted blogs do not have an ‘area’ where you can add ping engines.

Already that’s 3 strikes against blogspot.com’s blogs regarding one of the most powerful blogging techniques known to blog publishers.

However, here’s a little you can do to correct this right now…

Turn the ping on…

a) Log into your blogger account at www.blogger.com

b) Click “Change Settings”

c) Click “Publishing”

d) Where it says “Notify Weblogs”, set to “Yes” (and Save Settings)

And PING! for more exposure…

e) Go to www.pingomatic.com every time you add an item to your blog and insert your blog url into the box (you’ve now just pinged 12 of the engines).

More on WordPress and Movable Type next…

My best!

Laura Childs

p.s. for even more exposure and fun, do this as well in blogger from your settings…

Get Your Feed Url…

f) Click “Site Feed”

g) Where it says Publish Site Feed, select “Yes”

h) Copy down the Site Feed Url on that page.

i) and submit that url to the rss directories… :)

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Read More Like It: RSS Industry News, Using RSS Feeds

4 Replies to “Your Blog’s Ping - Can You Hear It?”

  1. Marketing with RSS Feeds on June 4th, 2005 9:30 pm

    Get the Most From Your Blog

    Google’s blogger blogs are wonderfully free, highly versatile and come with a pile of free templates to choose from! Plus blogger dynamically publishes an RSS Feed based on your content ~ and RSS Feeds are a great way to drive traffic!
    They&#82…

  2. Olga Farber Becker on July 10th, 2005 12:01 pm

    Hi Laura,

    I just saw your this blog, and I love it. :)

    Something about pingomatic, I’d like to add.

    Not many people pay attention when they come to pinogmatic.com, that they enter there their *blog* URL, and more than a half, I think, of the servers pingomatic pings, get pings for feeds, not blogs.

    So if people don’t start their feeds as you showed in the post, they’ll not use more than a half of the pings pingomatic sends. But that’s not all.

    You write there your blog URL, so what pingomatic does to fetch this feed URL, it uses the autodiscovery tags. (auto-what?? ;))

    looks like this:

    You should add it between the HEAD tags of your blog template.

    Otherwise you ping only blog directories, which is a pity. ;))

    Btw, Blogger, once you tell it to publish a feed for you, *will* add the autodiscovery tag, but only for the Atom feed that it publishes. It’s better to transfer the feed to FeedBurner to have the stats, RSS feed format etc., and then you have to manually add that autodiscovery tag for your feed at FeedBurner.

    There’s more to it, I can’t write it all here. :)

    I have more detailed information on Blogger settings in the free report available from http://rss-submission-service.com

    Laura, I sent you an email now, could you please tell me if you got it?

    Thank you,
    and keep up your wonderful blogging.
    Olga.

  3. Olga Farber Becker on July 10th, 2005 12:04 pm

    Oops, sorry, it omitted the code for the autodiscovery tag (after the words “looks like this:”), and I don’t know how to add it here so that it would get published.

    I guess you’ll have to take it from that report. ;)

    Olga.

  4. Hillary on June 13th, 2007 2:08 pm

    Thanks for sharing these. I’ll be using them to increase my own blogs promotion.