Janric Website Design

If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want websites 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’ plenty of things, not just a blog. Loads of years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping computers remotely and if we got an answer back, then we believed they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your machine, perhaps across your network to other computers.

And that is principally what a ping is – one machine seeing if another 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 communication saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a site service, rather than merely them answering that they are there, it is taken as an sign 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” communication. Of course, to respond they need to now what website sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your web site address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the communication apart and stores your web site address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, typically because you have generated new content that you want them to take a look at.

Identify new content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, probably 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 fresh. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your web site.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other web-sites that we have new 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 listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab fresh matter 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 new content onto the search engines.

A Little communication Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various vital web-sites that we now have an update on our own site and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

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