WordPress is great at most things, but one thing it’s not great at is stopping your (self hosted) blog from being classed as a ping spammer.
Chances are you don’t even know what I’m talking about unless you have spent some time in Geekdom, and that’s fine. That’s the point of reading blogs like this one – to find out something new in an ever changing online world.
No doubt you know what a spammer is so I don’t need to explain that, but a ping is another matter.
If you want to read the technical interpretation of a ping hover your mouse over this link. If that doesn’t float your boat let me explain it in a more down to earth way. A ping is a message sent from one web server (your blog) to another web server (Google, Technorati, Feedburner etc) to tell the crawl spiders that you’re blog has new content you would like them to index. As soon as the ping notification is received by the web servers in your ping list, the spiders visit your site and index the new content. All of this is done in super fast time, behind the scenes and without any kind of notification regarding anything at all.
However, there is a problem that you may not be aware of.
WordPress, out of the box and without any modifications, sends out a ping EACH TIME YOU EDIT A POST! Not just when you publish a post, or when you update a published post. It, as far as I’ve been able to establish, sends out a ping even when you save a draft post (please let me know if you know differently).
This is what WordPress says about pinging:
Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!
Given that a ping is designed to tell external sites you have published new content, I’m sure you can understand the severity of sending out a ping each time you make a small change. I have saved this post four times so far, which means four pings (would have) been sent in the time it has taken me to write a few short paragraphs (unless I used a plugin to prevent it).
The bottom line is – EXCESSIVE PINGING CAN GET YOUR DOMAIN BANNED! from using ping servers. At least that’s what people say, and I’ve got no reason at all to doubt that.
It wouldn’t surprise me if experienced bloggers didn’t know about this pinging flaw. It’s not something you read about every day. And because it all happens behind the scenes it’s not something you can easily monitor. But what can you do about it?
As always, there’s a plugin for that. There’s actually a few, but the one I use is Ping Optimizer by MaxBlogPress. The plugin is free, but you have to register to enable it. Once you have done that WordPress will only ping published posts, and there’s a log for you to check the success or failure of your pings.
You enable the plugin in the usual way, but once you’ve done that there are a few settings to change or add to. Not least is the ping server list.
I’ve seen several posts that contain lists of many ping servers, but a lot of the links in the list are duplicates and may mean the server is pinged twice. This is because the biggest ping server is Pingomatic, and many services are pinged by Pingomatic. So, if you ping Pingomatic and a service that Pingomatic pings, you’ve pinged the same server twice.
The solution I suggest is to stick to the ping list provided by WordPress:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping
Get the most up to date version here.
A couple more lists you might find useful can be found at Instant Info Online and Vladimir Prelovac’s site.
If you prefer, you could use a service like Feed Shark to do the pinging for you.
When you have the list paste it into the box provided in the Ping Optimizer settings page:
Once all that is in the place you can edit your posts as many times as you like without the fear of getting your domain banned from using the various ping services because they think you are a ping spammer, when we both know you’re not.
