WordPress blogs have one powerful feature that every blogger has always been proud of – the ability to automatically contact a list of resources that your blog has new content. This list of resources (directories, search engines and sites that link to your articles) which are generally called a pinglist, have over the years been a distinquishing mark of wordpress blogs.

Up to this moment, many bloggers will easily point to the ping list as one of the traffic generating power of wordpress blogs. When setting up a new wordpress blog one of the first things you’re told to put in place is a ping list. But is this not some outdated blogging advice from the dark ages?

Now, I must say in all of my blogs I’ve a list of pinging services which are notified when I publish a new article. Besides, in line with the general advice, I also have plugins installed to prevent excessive pinging. However, I recently read a number of blog posts discussing this subject of pinging and what I discovered is really unsettling.

Do you know that a large number of pinging services do not exist anymore? Do you know that even Technorati and Yahoo have stopped accepting pings and even some of Google’s ping servers have ceased to accept them?

Considering all these, the question is,

Is pinging really worth it anymore? Is there any more benefits in sending out pings whenever you post a new article?

Jeff Chandler of Weblogtoolscollection.com believes it’s not worth it.  Writing on the topic, “Another Part Of Blogging Dies – Pinging” he says, though many bloggers believes pinging is a traffic generating tactic but that is not so because even when he has removed the pinglist from his blog, traffic has not in any way reduced. Jeff’s conclusions about pinging services is;

“While there are still a number of sites sending out Pings, I highly doubt it’s because of any benefits the site owner would receive for doing so. It doesn’t hurt to leave the ping list in tact which is what I recommend doing until all ping servers bite the dust.”

Paul Maloney of Wpzine.com is also of the same view. Writing earlier on this same topic, he questioned, “WordPress Ping Lists: Is There A Point Anymore?”

Agreeing that a few years ago one could actually see some traffic coming from the ping list, he reasoned that today they have lost their place. According to him,

“Most of the recommended Ping Lists contain a large number of services which simply do not exist anymore, just leaving links such as Google blog search that still are functional. Even Technorati and Yahoo have stopped accepting pings and even some of Google’s ping servers have ceased to accept them, so should we stop sending them?”

After reading these posts I decided to take a look at the stats for the ping list I had been using on this blog. What I saw actually surprised me. Now, I’ve a long list of pinging services but to my amazement I discovered that less than 2% of those services were actually working!

Surprised? Yes, because I’ve always thought I was sending pings to all these services. But like Paul Maloney said, only a few of these services are truly functional at the moment.

I quickly had to do a rethink and decided on updating the ping list. This is because I don’t want to remove the list outright, at least for now. I simply had to remove the ones that are not pinging any more. So below is my new ping list after removing the whole lot that were just occupying space.

My Updated Ping List:

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

So for now I’m not going to use any more useless pinglist no matter what any one says. I’m going to stick with the above and of course be ready to remove any one that stops pinging in the near future.

I know this really is a debatable topic as many bloggers are still using various pinging services out there. So I want to hear your thoughts about the use of ping list for wordpress blogs.

Do you think they are of any worth right now? Are they bringing you any traffic? Let’s discuss this.

Article by +Chadrack

Chadrack is a Freelance SEO Content Writer, Blogger & Social Media enthusiast. He is passionate about helping clients create highly engaging content that gains attention and trust of site visitors. If you desire to push your brand awareness and internet visibility in an extremely cost effective manner then his seo content writing service is the right choice!

Connect Chadrack on Facebook | Twitter | Google + | LinkedIn