Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top
Search Engine Rankings?
It’s been all over the SEO-student rumor mill for weeks now, and has finally made it into my
Inbox – in droves.
The new get-traffic-quick scheme for search engine results has arrived – flooding ping
notification sites with update announcements, even though your blog hasn’t been updated.
The question is does this- or some variation of it work? If not, where did this idea come
from?
Okay, bad news first.
Pinging sites like Yahoo and Syndic8 every half-hour for several days or weeks, to notify of
updates when they haven’t been made, does nothing but clog up the system. It’s called
spam-pinging and it has been around since 2002.
If you haven’t updated your blog, or you’re pinging updates of a site that isn’t even a blog
(or RSS feed, where applicable), in the long run it’s just going to make it harder to get
listed at these sites.
In the short run, you could get yourself banned from sites like Yahoo, though it isn’t
officially their policy to drop sites for spam-pinging.
Yet.
True, not all sites that have recently updated lists you can ping to be on are set up to block
pings of sites that aren’t updated. But they’ve found ways to block certain sites and users
before – it’s only a matter of time.
So even in the unlikely event that you could find some way to make this work temporarily,
you’d just be setting yourself up to be dropped, in as little as a day in some cases.
So if this method doesn’t work, why are there tools available to help you flood these
directories?
Well, let’s look at the situation logically.
Until the middle of 2004, certain adult web properties were able to create several bogus
blog sites – in particular, blogspot.com. They’d found that the links leading back to them
from those sites helped their page rank in Google, as well as their search results placement.
Although Google got wise to them and closed this loophole by fall of this past year, several
legitimate blog sites have found that they continue to enjoy high rankings for some
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