Experts Blog

Generate More Pings for Higher Search Rankings

By Casey Markee on Jan 19, 2013 - 03:08 PM

It's not conjecture, it's FACT! that Pinging is an explicit call to Bing and Google to fetch new content. If you have been following our coverage of the "Freshness Update" with Google, then you know how much emphasis we put on this in 2012. The more you are able to generate pings and encourage repeat visits, the more and deeper you can generate crawls of your site content, and the more value that content is given algorithmically (if it's high-quality mind you).

That's why we have been so big on pushing blogs as the main content generation vehicle for sites over the last couple of years. Regular Web pages do not have the inherent ability to ping search engines when they have been added to or updated with new content.

Blogs however, have that inherent, basic function. Every time you add a blog post, every time a new comment is generated on that blog post, or a trackback is generated, a new ping is sent out requesting that Google and Bing come and fetch that content. It's delicious junk food for search engine spiders.

As a refresher, check-out our resources on the Google Freshness Update and WHY having a blog is so important in a post-Panda/Penguin world:

Next, check out this report that we published back in 2010 in which we predicted that updating your content frequently would only become more and more important.

In your case, if you have submitted a sitemap to Google for your Web site pages, Google will automatically refresh or ping that sitemap based upon the time parameters you enter. So if you entered daily, weekly or monthly, that's the time considerations you have suggested that Google use to come back and reindex your site's content.

This clearly has a downside and it's a big one.

"Most people update their Web site content at infrequent times and unless they actively ping Google it may take days for that specific updated content to be re-cached."

However, with a blog, this is all moot. The blog automatically pings Google the minute the post goes live. That's why you see blog posts get indexed in minutes and rank very, very fast. Again, it's this kind of QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) date-stamped content that the Google Freshness Update is designed to target.

That's why if you don't have a blog, you need one; otherwise, no freshness boost for you! It's the fastest way to get your content out there and to continue to REINFORCE your existing content.

Further, let's say you have updated your Web site content and now you are just waiting on Google to find and re-cache that content through your sitemap. This, as we discussed above, can be a slow process. Fortunately, you have a blog. By publishing a blog post and linking it to this recently updated page you WILL generate a new crawl by Google when it comes back and snatches your minty fresh date specific blog post and crawls all the links (including the link to your updated Web page) at the same time.

Now, as with anything, there is a caveat here: you can't just publish CRAP folks! The Freshness Update in its most basic form is meant to reward the freshest, HIGHEST-QUALITY content. So if you are publishing every day or multiple times a day and your content is still pretty sub-par, no amount of newly generated pings in the world is going to get you higher rankings. If you don't have anything powerful or really interesting to say, don't blog that day. Frequency doesn't equal higher rankings.

Check out this featured article to get inspiration and motivation for your content creation, Must See Tips & Tools for Fresh Content Creation, Optimization & Distribution.

There are a lot of SEO myths and conjecture online. The fact that frequent pings from Google and Bing can and do lead to increased crawl rates, faster content indexing, and higher rankings, isn't one of them. And as with anything, you have to be publishing great content while connecting with your blog audience.Planet Ocean article end

- Casey Markee, Writer & Lead SEO Consultant, Planet Ocean