Give Me a Ping, Mr. Vasili. One Ping Only, Please.

Another tool for letting potential readers know about changes or updates to your site, besides Digg or posting to message boards is to use a ‘ping’ server to get the word out. While some blog and site authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time a new post is created, with Zoomshare this is manual process. But no worries the process is not tooo painful.

A ‘ping’ server creates a list of sites with new material that can be used to keep track of updates on the web. There are a number of ‘open-to-the-public’ servers, like Weblogs.com and blo.gs. With these sites others can use the aggregated list of site updates for their own as needed. On the other side of things, there are also a number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their internal usage.

While one could create a list of the best open and proprietary servers and then go to each individual ping server with a site update notice, I did promise a painless process, so here it is: Ping-o-matic. Ping-o-matic pings multiple ping servers at once (say that 10 times fast). All you need to do is fill-in your site’s name and URL and choose which servers to ping. To keep it as simple as possible, just click on the ‘Check Common’ link and then hit ‘Send Pings’.

What’s the big deal? As I alluded to, search engines use this information to provide search results on what’s new on the web. Feed aggregators use the results from ping servers to tell viewers which items on their subscription lists have recently been updated. All of this means the ping server will help get the word out about your site to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, for as little work as possible.

Ok, now for the most important piece of information here: Don’t abuse the system. That is don’t go sending pings everyday if you haven’t updated your site everyday. Moreover, don’t send a ping for each page on your site. One ping for your site, after you’ve updated your site. Anything more will be considered ‘noise’ at best and ‘abuse’ or ‘spam’ at worst. In other words, your pings will be ignored and you’ll have lost out on an important tool.