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Image Credits: jεƒ saƒi
Do you know that senseless pinging practices of WordPress could have banned you already from Social Media web sites? An that it can very well happen with the default settings of your WordPress blog? It might be a bit overwhelming with all the nasty questions. To ease the pressure a bit, let’s start with a simple question.
So, what do you know about pinging?
In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.
In need of the less geekier version? Let me put it this way. Pinging is like sending a press release. You write the press release, and post the press release for the journalists to let them know that so and so had happened. So, pinging is like “letting the press know about it by posting it to them”.
So this “letting the press know about it by posting it to them” feature is the trump card of all blogs. It’s the thing that gives blogs the edge over normal web sites. Basically, your blogging platforms Ping system is like you own virtual PR team.
Well, if you’re a WordPress blogger, it’s really easy to get banned.
Pinging is a good thing – if not, a great thing for bloggers. But due to a few logical flaws in WordPress, pinging can actually hurt your reputation online.
Here’s the story. When a new post is added or edited, all the services that are specified in WordPress are pinged. Let’s say after publishing a post you needed to edit it because of a really small spelling mistake. When you edit it, WordPress treats it as a new edition of the post and pings all the services automatically again. Now, would the press like it very much if your PR team bothered them to get them a new version of the same press release posing under the assumption that it’s a new press release? I don’t think so! But that’s exactly what WordPress does.
Just like the press hating you for that, the services that WordPress pings will hate you for pinging a post multiple times. Just imagine., if you had to edit the same article 4 times, you’d be pinging the services 5 times in a row for the same post. They will hate you for this and Technorati will ban you if they already haven’t.
Let’s look inside WordPress for a second. When you navigate to the writing tab of the settings, you will be presented with a dialog like this.
This dialog tells you what services are being pinged after you add/edit a new post. As you can see, I ping Technorati and Ping-o-Matic. Ping-o-Matic automatically pings many services like FeedBurner, Ice Rocket and etc for me. And Technorati – yeah., you guessed it right!
So, I ping almost 20 services each time I post. If I don’t take any safety precautions, I might as well lose half of them.
Well, you can try and be extra careful with your blogging and make room for no errors and give up all hope of editing a post after you publish it. But we both know that’s not going to happen.
The second and the most effective method is to employ a plugin to control the pinging process. There were many plugins for WordPress that seemed to get the job done in the past. But, for one reason or the other, when WordPress progressed several ground-breaking version, those plugins did not quite keep up. But luckily for us, there’s this one plugin left. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. I’m running WordPress 2.5+ with the latest version of this plugin and so far, it gets the job done.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer optimizes your outgoing pings and refrains from pinging the services unnecessarily for post edits.
If you haven’t already taken any safety precautions against this, I highly recommend that you install this plugin to make sure there will be no heartaches in the future. You’ve obviously heard a few bloggers talking in the past about how they got banned by Technorati right?
[tags]Ping, Optimize, Technorati, Social Media Ban, Plugin, Optimizer[/tags]
Hey thanks a ton for this post! I’ve worried about the extra pinging and hoped that the newest versions of WP got rid of it but…. I guess not. :/
I appreciate you getting the word out about how to not bother people with our pings!
You’re most welcome. That’s what bloggers are for right?
Oh my goodness, are you serious about this? I often update my already published posts and I guess “spam” those ping servers pretty often! (and I don’t have just 2 ping servers!)
Never know things such as this, thanks for pointing it out!
I guess I’m pretty serious about this Mike. In fact, it took me a while to believe the whole story when I first heard it. I’m shocked that so many Wordpress users are not doing anything about this or are not taking it seriously.
I guess I must have been banned by now. I am found of tweaking my posts.
I wish I had read this earlier.
Thanks for pointing it out. I will install the plugin right-away before more damage is done. Cheers.
Wow Tony, I am extremely sorry to hear that. Well, at least now you know..
Thanks a bunch for this post! I tend to edit multiple times after I have posted – bad habit I know, but I always seem to think of a better way to phrase things when it’s already too late ^^’
I was worried about multiple pinging, and now I can fix it. What a relief!
[...] when you have some time off, go through your old posts and add Technorati Tags to them too. But, ping it with caution. Don’t ping it multiple times in frequent time [...]
just installed the pluggin. Thanks so much for the info.How do we know if we are already banned?
I’ve been using MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer for some time on all my sites, it’s a great plugin as are all their others.
Jayen
I did not know this, but I often rely solely on manual pings anyway. I have blogger (it’s heavily modified) so I’m not too worried, but that’s a horrible little thing for Wordpress to do. I know they’re being helpful, but getting banned isn’t very helpful.
Well, does anyone know if this “overpinging” happens to the linked websites in a post as well? It would be nice if this blog’s comment section had a “subscribe to comment” so I could actually get the answer to this question without having to keep checking back to the site. But anyway.
[...] when you have some time off, go through your old posts and add Technorati Tags to them too. But, ping it with caution. Don’t ping it multiple times in frequent time [...]
[...] when you have some time off, go through your old posts and add Technorati Tags to them too. But, ping it with caution. Don’t ping it multiple times in frequent time [...]