Author: Tinu Abayomi-Paul
It's been all over the SEO-student rumor mill for weeks now, and has finally made it into my Inbox - in droves.
The new get-traffic-quick scheme for search engine
results has arrived - flooding ping notification sites with update
announcements, even though your blog hasn't been updated.
The question is does this- or some variation of it work? If not, where did this
idea come from?
Okay, bad news first.
Pinging sites like Yahoo and Syndic8 every half-hour for several days or weeks,
to notify of updates when they haven't been made, does nothing but clog up the
system. It's called spam-pinging and it has been around since 2002.
If you haven't updated your blog, or you're pinging updates of a site that isn't
even a blog (or RSS feed, where applicable), in the long run it's just going to
make it harder to get listed at these sites.
In the short run, you could get yourself banned from sites like Yahoo, though it
isn't officially their policy to drop sites for spam-pinging.
Yet.
True, not all sites that have recently updated lists you can ping to be on are
set up to block pings of sites that aren't updated. But they've found ways to
block certain sites and users before - it's only a matter of time.
So even in the unlikely event that you could find some way to make this work
temporarily, you'd just be setting yourself up to be dropped, in as little as a
day in some cases.
So if this method doesn't work, why are there tools available to help you flood
these directories?
Well, let's look at the situation logically.
Until the middle of 2004, certain adult web properties were able to create
several bogus blog sites - in particular, blogspot.com. They'd found that the
links leading back to them from those sites helped their page rank in Google, as
well as their search results placement.
Although Google got wise to them and closed this loophole by fall of this past
year, several legitimate blog sites have found that they continue to enjoy high
rankings for some keywords that are easier to get. Some people erroneously
assume that it's because their updates appear on Weblogs.com and/or in Blogger's
Most Recently Updated pages several times a day.
Having noticed that occasionally, they would get spidered around the same time
they posted, they realized that there was a correlation between pinging and
better search engine listings.
And they're not completely wrong - there is a parallel. But a parallel is not a
cause. It's just one facet of the relationship between blogs and getting better
results in Yahoo, Google and MSN.
Their frequency of updates had something to do with their rankings, yes. But it
is not what guarantees they get spidered - and if the blog isn't set up to take
advantage of the visit from the search engine spiders, they don't get listed.
To begin to have an understanding of how to get similar results for your site,
you have to look at the bigger picture. Spam-pinging isn't going to do it, and
as I've said in other articles, there are other ethical, faster, simpler ways to
do this.
So what is this bigger picture?
First of all, blogs have a natural tendency to rank higher in search engines
because they
Have well-structured site architecture
Make use of anchor text linking
Are well linked,
Are frequently updated, and,
Are focused tightly around a narrow theme, among other things.
Couple this with the ease of being able to get one-way links from several sites
favored by the search engines, and you have two-thirds of the formula for a
well-ranked blog.
However, just because these sites appear on publicly displayed ping notification
lists and other sites that keep abreast of blog updates, this doesn't mean that
you can get away with pinging them without updating your site.
It also doesn't mean that sites that have authentically updated and sent pings
will appear in Google, Yahoo or MSN simply from being frequently updated.
The good news is, you don't need to deluge the ping sites to get noticed. Doing
so is often a waste of time, and may be a harmful one.
Your best bet for now is to continue to achieve your natural search engine
position through blogging, basic search engine optimization, and a common sense
approach to frequent updates.
And yes, by the way, there IS an ethical way to get into search engines and
achieve high rankings with a blog, but it's not a matter of volume. It's more a
matter of timing, supply and demand. But explaining that process takes a level
of detail and an amount of space not available here.
About the Author
Tinu Abayomi-Paul is a
website promotion specialist and author of five books and ebooks for the online
entrepreneur.
Her last project was a contribution to Rok Hrastnik's comprehensive guide to RSS,
"Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS". You can find more of her
daily tips on RSS, Blogs, Google tools, and more, at her main blog,
Free Traffic Tips.
Source: http://www.bloggertalk.net
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