Web Design Discussion

Wordpress has a built-in feature which allows you to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of web traffic immediately. You automatically gain backlinks to your blog.

What are pingbacks?

The pingback system is a way for your blog to be automatically notified when other Web sites link to it. It is entirely transparent to the linking author, requiring no user intervention to work, and operates on principles of automatic discovery of everything that it needs to know. A sample blog post involving pingback might go like this:

Alice posts to her blog. The post she’s made includes a link to a post on Bob’s blog.

-Alice’s blogging system contacts Bob’s blogging system and says “look, Alice made a post which linked to one of your posts”.

-Bob’s blogging system then includes a link back to Alice’s post on his original post.

-Reader’s of Bob’s article can follow this link to Alice’s post to read her opinion.

-It enables reverse linking — a way of going back up a chain of links rather than merely drilling down.

For a more more in-depth explanation read Pingback

How to check if your Word Press Blog is automatically configured for pinging

WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you have updated your blog by sending an XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and update their proprietary indices with your update. People browsing sites like Technorati or DayPop can now find your most recent posts.

1. Log in to your Word Press admin panel
2. Check if you see http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the Update Services box.

Tip

Your blog should only ping when you have added a new post to your blog. However there is no way of telling which post was edited and caused your Word Press Blog to ping. If you edit several already published posts, it will cause a ping frenzy.

You can avoid this by installing the Smart Update Pinger. This will prevent you from getting banned for ping spamming.

Benefits of the Smart Update Pinger

The WordPress built-in ping functions are ignored, however a copy of that code has been put inside the plugin to give detailed log reports. You can see which services will accept and reject your ping, and why. “Ping Services Now!” button. This lets you ping all services without writing a post.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.