Update services are tools which you can use to let other people know that you have added content to your website.
Semiologic Pro, by means of the native WordPress feature, automatically notifies popular Update Services by sending an XML-RPC ping when you publish a new post. This list of update services is referred to as your “ping list”. You’ll find yours under Settings / Writing.
Ping List Discussion
Notifying others that you have updated your content increases the exposure of your website, thereby increasing the number of potential visitors and its SEO ranking.
There are scores of opinions regarding ping lists. Opinions vary from using just Ping-o-matic to lists that include a hundred or more services. It is important that you keep the following points in mind if you decide to extend the default list:
- Placing too many services in your list is bound to result is sending multiple notifications to the same update service. This can get you banned from the latter.
- Maintaining a ping list is a major housekeeping chore, as scores of services come and go each year.
- Ping lists with more than a few items can have a tremendous impact on your server’s performance.
Still, you’re probably reading this page because a scaremonger told you that WordPress pings were broken. Rest assured on this: WordPress’ ping feature has worked fine out of the box for quite a while. You do NOT need plugins to fix it.
Recommended Ping List
We believe the default services is quite sufficient:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
Indeed, the latter will forward your ping to other update services. You’ll find the list of affected update services on pingomatic.com. Notice that major search engines and blog update services are all included.
Again, if you decide to extend the list, be wary of adding more than a handful of items. We’ve seen sites with excessively long ping lists get shut down by hosts.
Feedburner’s PingShot service
If you use Feedburner on your site, and are really serious about extending your ping list, consider using Feedburner’s PingShot service instead.
It works much like any update service, except that it is managed by Feedburner. Whenever the latter detects that your feed was updated, it’ll send ping notifications to your preferred services.
Using Your Ping List
In Semiologic Pro, the list under Settings / Writing gets pinged whenever you publish to your blog.
This affects posts you’ve manually published, as well as posts you’ve set to be published in the future.
The pinging occurs automatically, at the rate of once per hour at most.