The process of "blog and ping" or "tag and ping" is used to bring
internet traffic to a website or blogsite. The process is fairly
simple and effective with several valuable benefits and very few
disadvantages.

Pinging Defined

In simple terms, a ping is a way to electronically verify the
presence of a particular location on the internet and to get that
location's attention. A ping is a basic program that checks the
validity of an internet IP address and that the address can
accept a request. An acronym was invented to give validity to the
word "ping;" Packet Inter-Network Groper.

The Process

A ping is most often used when a person updates the entries on a
weblog or blog. A blog is designed to be a very active website
where new information, ideas, and discussions are regularly
posted. Static websites are less frequently updated and not
usually pinged.

Blogs are designed to be easily updated, sometimes several times
daily. Blogs frequently feature new products that the author has
created or feature reviews of products that the author promotes
through an affiliate relationship. Since the author will receive
compensation through the sale of the product it is important to
the author that the search engines are alerted to the fact that a
new blog page has been added and is immediately available to the
internet.

Not all blog posts are written to promote a product or to create
a sale. Often an article is written solely to offer good
information to the reader or to provide interesting
entertainment. In these cases as well, the author will want the
new article to be quickly indexed by the search engines so that
internet traffic will find its way to the article.

To receive the desired publicity the author needs to send a ping
to a large number of servers. The easiest way to accomplish that
task is to use a pinging service that will ping multiple ping
servers. The many blogging platforms that are commonly used
provide an automatic notification to a pinging service for the
author.

Advantages

However, there are advantages in notifying multiple pinging
services rather than just one. Using multiple pinging services
will result in a larger number of servers receiving the ping and
receiving notification that there is new content on the blog.

Since the search engines are constantly roaming through internet
sites and pages, their visits to the many servers that have been
pinged by the pinging services will alert them to the new content
that they have not yet visited. That's the first step toward the
goal of bringing the search engines to the new blog post, finding
it to be worthwhile and new, and indexing the page so that the
internet community can find it in the future. The more servers
that are pinged when the new content is posted, the more likely
the search engines are to find the new page and begin their
evaluation process.

The many blogging services allow the author to add additional
pinging services to those that the blogging service already
notify automatically. The author can easily search the internet
for lists of the most popular pinging services and manually add
their list to the appropriate area with their blogging service.

Disadvantages

The many different pinging services ping different servers but
also ping many of the same servers. The result is that using
multiple pinging services means that some servers will receive
multiple pings for the same blog article. It is possible that a
particular server could consider the multiple pings to be a form
of spam and will block the blog article from their server.
However it is not possible to determine how many pings is too
many. The author should use their best judgment to decide how
many pinging services to use.

The wise use of the pinging technique has been proven to bring
traffic to a website. The of "blog and ping" is one of the many
valuable tools that an author should learn to use in order to
build traffic and popularity.

Andy Henry