If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want web sites for example Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?
Are You There?
You could 'ping' plenty of things, not just a blog. Plenty of years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping computers remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You might even do this yourself from your computer, maybe across your network to other machines.
And that is in essence what a ping is - one PC seeing if another PC is responding.
How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our websites. The ping service evolves a bit from merely a basic message 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 web site sending the ping that they want some attention.
The site receiving the communication will respond back that it has received your message, usually with a "success" communication. Of course, to reply they need to now what site sent the request, so as well as "Are you there?", your communication has included your website address as the sender.
Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your site address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, regularly because you have created fresh content that you want them to have a look at.
Identify fresh content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, probably instantly, perhaps 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 website.
And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other websites that we have fresh 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 included and the new page cached on Google within a number of hours.
The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are going. They want to be able to get new content 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 fresh matter and quick - and helps us do what we want - get our fresh content onto the search engines.
A Little message Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just principally shouts in excess of to various vital sites that we now have an update on our own website and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little communication, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.
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