You might have already been banned from Social Media. You just don’t know it… Yet!

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.

How can pinging get me banned?

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.

What can I do to prevent this?

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?

Technorati Tags: Ping, Optimize, Technorati, Social Media Ban, Plugin, Optimizer