Friday, November 14, 2008

Build traffic tip - set Send Pings to "Yes"

One of the ways to help build traffic to your blog is to ping blog update notification services to inform them that your blog has been updated so that they will crawl and update you blog. With the old classic Blogger, you can set weblogs.com, and only weblogs.com to be automatically pinged whenever you publish a new post.

What I normally do is to set "Send Ping" to "No", and whenever I publish a new post, I will go to pingoat.com to ping all the ping blog update notification services (including weblogs.com). That is easy to do because all you have to do is to enter your blog URL (which can easily be done by right-clicking on "View Blog" in the Dashboard, then pasting it into the URL box, type in the title of the blog (this can also be very easy because if you have done it before, the moment you enter the first or second letter of the title, a list of titles of blogs you have pinged before will drop down for you to select), click the "Categories" and this will cause all the blog update notification services to be ticked, then click "Go Pingoat!".

"Send Ping" is normally set to "No" by default, but today, I decided to go to SETTINGS > PUBLISHING to check and found this:The wordings is a bit small in the screenshot. You can click on the screenshot to enlarge it or for your convenience, I will put the wordings below:

"Pings blog update notification services that many individuals and services use to track blog changes."

Please note that it says "Pings blog update notification services" and not just "Ping weblogs.com". This means New Blogger has changed this to ping more services without alerting us to the change. So I will probably change my habit and set my blog to ping automatically instead of laboriously pinging myself.

However, I will try to get more information as to which blog update notification services are being pinged and if I get some information, I will update this post.