Review: new plugin for pinging
For those of you who have been doing stuff on the internet for a little while, you will most likely know that one good way of getting your website noticed is to have good Page Rank (with the likes of Google or Alexa).
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – on your pages and blog posts plays a part in this, as does having high-quality, regularly updated content. And “pinging” your site to various ping directories, in effect asking them to link back to you, is also very useful.
- The good news is, it can be done automatically within Wordpress.
- The bad news is that if you update a post several times, you send out a “ping” each time, which can cause you to be labelled a “ping spammer” … even thought there is no bad intention on your part at all!
By default WordPress pings all your specified directories whenever you post a new topic in your blog. That sounds good, right? Well, not really – because WordPress also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post… so if you edit a post 15 times then WordPress will send 15 pings to each ping directory you alert. - The other bad news is that, if you post-date posts to appear in your blog at some future date, the pinging takes place when the blog is created, not posted… resulting in pings to posts that can’t yet be viewed. This can damage your credibility with your readers, as well as annoying the ping directories & search engines.
Enter the heroes!!! …
these are the guys at MaxBlogPress, with their plugin called “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer“.
When you use this plugin, it manages your pings in a far more sensible, and ping-friendly way.
- When you write a new post, your blog pings and notifies all the ping services in your directory list that it (the blog) has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
- Now the really good news: when you edit an existing post, it won’t send another ping to ping services – this prevents any sort of “spamming” activity & stops your blog from getting banned.
- When you post-date a post by editing the time stamp to a future date, this plugin will ping only when your post actually appears in your blog on the scheduled date. So if you pre-write 10 posts for a 10-week schedule, one ping will be sent each week as the post “goes live”, instead of 10 pings being sent all at once on the day your write all the posts.
The Good and The Bad
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This plugin is free to download from this page: “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer“ - When you activate the plugin, there is also a link in the text about the plugin, that you click so you go straight to the admin panel for the plugin; no more searching for where it is under your Tools or Settings toolbars!
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You do have to register the plugin, which involves a double optin step as well as an OTO (One Time Offer), but considering this plugin is free, that seems a small price to pay… and of course you unsubscribe if you find that the email communications aren’t useful to you.
Conclusion: this is a very worth-while plugin, and one that I have now installed on my main business sites.
P.S. You can check your website’s page rank at the website http://www.prchecker.info/
Tagged with: maxblogpress • ping and tag • ping directory • ping optimizer
Filed under: SEO tips • Useful Tips
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Alexa rankings can’t be the sole determinants of measuring a sites importance and popularity as the http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/fortunehotels.in rankings do not take into account all the browser types like Windows Vista etc.
Martin, thanks for that bit of info; it’s definitely worth being aware of that.
Does anyone else have experience of how to get around this challenge?
[Check your Alexa rankings at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ ]
thanks
Tracey
Tracey,
Congratulations on your presentation at Daniel’s event last night. It is always good to hear other’s point of view – and there are so many to play with around online marketing!
Regarding Alexa ranking, this is surely the most broad brush measure of success and is only relevant in showing whether your ranking is any better or worse than it was last week/month/year.
It is dependent on data from people using the Alexa toolbar and does little to indicate how successful you may be in competition with other websites selling similar products and services. If I’m selling apples then any comparison with someone selling oranges is completely irrelevant.
As SEO is about being relevant to your chosen keywords so each keyword search by a prospect will produce a different niche market – broad or narrow according to how specific the keyword or keyword phrase was. So you can be at the very bottom of the Alexa ranking yet simultaneously top of search engine listing for the keywords that your customer is searching for with their credit card ready in their hand.
Success is measured by profitability, not ranking.
I’ve tried a number of ranking tools and found Rank Checker, a free tool from SEObook.com at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/ to be very useful.
Regards
Bruce
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for your comment, and I’m glad you enjoyed the talk last night. It was good to meet you.
Thanks very much for this perspective on Alexa. You are right, it’s not a measure of success; I view it more as a way of showing that you’re going somewhere – of course that’s in relation to millions of other sites, so it’s not niche-specific. But I find it exciting to see the changes in ranking from one week to the next… as long as they’re going upwards!
My thoughts are that as long as your websites are getting noticed in such circumstances, as WELL as in the search engines, it all helps.
I’ll try out the rank checker you recommend. I’ve had some problems in the past with FF plugins; some of them stop me from having more than a single FF window open, which is very limiting – so fingers crossed it won’t happen with this one.
I’ll be checking out your site this weekend too… so thanks for “dropping by” and commenting!
kind regards
Tracey