What is Pinging?

In blogging, pinging is a way of letting the world know that you have new content on your blog. This process gets the attention of Search Engines, Blog Directories, News Websites, Aggregators, Feed Websites and many others.

Basically, it’s like you’re telling the search engines: “hey, my blog is updated, come check it out.”

Why Ping your blog?

When you’ve published a new post, it’s important to ping your blog so that search engines will be notified that you have added new content. This ensures your new blog post is picked up by the search engines quickly so you don’t have to wait until the next time the web crawlers visit your site for new content.

It is one of the fastest ways to get your new post indexed by the search engines.

The good news is, Wordpress has a built-in ability to automatically notify (pings) popular update services each time you publish a new post or updates an existing one. In turn, update services process the ping and update their indices accordingly so that people browsing sites like weblogs.com can get to know about your most recent posts and come to your blog.

Benefits of pinging:

• Getting indexed faster by the search engines.
• Increase your blog’s exposure and SEO benefits.
• Helps in getting instant traffic from a variety of sources.

WordPress Ping list 2015

By default Wordpress Ping only one pinging server called pingomatic.com, which in turn will send out a ping to over 15+ major ping services to let them know about your blog update.

But there are many more ping services out there that you can use to publicize your blog even more widely. This, in turn, helps increase traffic and bring more visitors to your site.

If you search for a Ping List on the internet, you’ll find lots, but most of them are either no longer active – or not accepting pings anymore since it was resulting in a lot of spam. Even Technorati, the most popular blog directory on the internet, have stopped accepting pings a few years ago.

After an extensive research and comparison, I have compiled a list of reliable and authoritative pinging services that you should have and these are 99% working for sure.

To update this list,  login to your WordPress admin area and navigate to Settings > Writing > Scroll down to Update Services and paste the following URLs in the text box.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2
https://blogs.yandex.ru/pings/
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
http://pingoo.jp/ping/
http://blog.with2.net/ping.php
http://blogpingr.de/ping/rpc2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

Note: After you’ve pasted the above list of services, check to make sure that each URL is separated by line break with no spaces in between or WordPress will only ping the first server on the list.

Update: Plugins like WordPress Ping Optimizer or MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer are no longer needed because WordPress now handles this on its own. So you don’t have to worry about getting banned for excessive pinging anymore. For more about this, read Chip Bennett’s explanation on the WordPress plugin repository.

Don’t go crazy with a massive list of pinging services

Avoid using long ping list on the internet that contain 100-150 services which simply do not exist anymore. If you have a long ping list, you’re just adding to the noise because they often contain URLs that are either outdated/dead or might go offline soon or late. Even the Official ping list at wordpress.org is also sorely outdated. The other problem with a large list, is that you could end up pinging the same URL multiple times, and may get labelled as a ping spammer by those services. Not good!

If you are still on the fence, stick with the default ping server rpc.pingomatic.com, which is all we really need.

If you find any dead links in the above list, please let me know in the comments – I’ll update the list accordingly. Also let me know what you think of or how many services do you have in your ping list.