If you are writing a weblog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want web-sites as for instance Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?
Are You There?
You can 'ping' lots of things, not just a site. Lots of years ago, before sites took off, we would ping computers remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your machine, perhaps across your network to other machines.
And that is in essence what a ping is - one PC seeing if a different computer is responding.
How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our websites. The ping service evolves a bit from merely a basic message saying "I'm here, are you there?". If you ping a site service, rather than only them answering that they are there, it is taken as an indication from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.
The website receiving the message will reply back that it has received your communication, typically with a "success" message. Of course, to reply they need to now what website sent the request, so as well as "Are you there?", your communication has included your web site address as the sender.
Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your site address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, frequently because you have produced new content that you want them to look at.
Identify fresh matter, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, probably instantly, maybe later that day - it is entirely up to the service what they do - their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is new. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your website.
And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other web sites that we have fresh matter and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I've seen Google come calling quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post included and the new page cached on Google within a number of hours.
The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are going. They want to be able to grab fresh content as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want - get new matter and quick - and helps us do what we want - get our fresh matter onto the search engines.
A Little communication Goes A Long Way
So, pinging only in essence shouts over to various crucial sites that we now have an update on our own web site and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little communication, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.
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Written by Keith Lunt of How To Start My Blog . For more blogging tips , call in.
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