Pinging is a process whereby you alert the blog search engines that you have updated your blog. Most blog software has a configuration option to detail which blog sites you want to alert, they should also come preconfigured with the most popular ping services.

This is different from the process that you might follow in relation to your core website. Typically you ‘submit’ your website to a search engine and it files your address (url), visiting at some point in the future. At this point the search engine spider will index as much of the site as it can navigate and you site will be included in its index a while after this.

What is the advantage of the pinging approach?

The main benefit is that the ping process is real time, happening each time you update your blog. The search engines know that following the ping there will be some new and up to date content to visit and index.

Following site submission and indexing, the search engines schedule a date to revisit your site. There is no guarantee that you will have updated any information and that visit could be a waste of time, bandwith and processing power.

Hence you can see from the search engine perspective each visit to a blog can be more valuable if new content is the goal.

Ok I get that I hear …. but how can my having a blog help my main web site? …… that will be in the next posting.