Pinging May Be Dangerous to Your Blog

Blogging services that allow pinging are a great service to the blogging public. However, many have shutdown new submissions due to spamming of the directories. There are just a few rules you should follow before you ping. For most blog directories, you should add your blog manually to each service. This is because the services may want your blog address, or your RSS feed, or your Atom feed, or a list of your blogs in OPML.

1. You must publish new content before you ping each time or it is considered spam.

2. Make sure your feed is updated before you ping. If you use Blogspot and burn your feed through Feedburner, there may be a lag before your new item is available from your feedburner feed.

3. Beware of double pinging. If you publish on Blogspot and have pinging (Settings-> Publishing) checked then you are pinging:
* Weblogs.com.

Then if you burn your feed to feedburner, you may be automatically pinging (PingShot under Publicize):

* Technorati
* My Yahoo
* PubSub
* Ping-o-matic
* Newsgator
… plus up to five additional services (my selections).
* Feedster
* icerocket
* Weblogs.Com (double ping from BlogSpot)
* TailRank
* Blogdigger
* FeedBurner (automatic)

Then if you go to Ping-o-matic, you are pinging the following if they are checked:

* Weblogs.com (third ping)
* Blo.gs
* Technorati (double ping)
* Feed Burner (double ping)
* Syndic8
* NewsGator (double ping)
* Feedster (double ping)
* My Yahoo! (double ping)
* PubSub.com (double ping)
* Blogdigger (double ping)
* BlogRolling
* BlogStreet
* Moreover
* Weblogalot
* Icerocket (double ping)
* News Is Free
* Topic Exchange

So whenever you go to ping, make sure you are not pinging the same service twice. This is the down side of these pinging services. If you have access to stats for your blog (free on Feedburner), you will see which bots (robots) are visiting your site. You might want to ping just these services when you update.