Dave, I’ve been hearing in the search engine optimization community about programs called “blog and ping” utilities. Supposedly, they are a real boon to getting top search engine ranking. What are they, how do they work, and what’s your opinion of whether they’re worth using?
I too have been seeing this discussion about these B&P utilities and I have to say that I don’t like them. Here’s why…
Weblogs are designed to allow you to easily add material to your Web site quickly and as frequently as you’d like. If you have a website about wedding favors, say, then you might write blog entries about weddings, receptions, dresses, rings, etc etc., to drum up interest in your particular niche of wedding favors. Search engine-wise, these blog entries help you be more easily found for people searching on these related topics too, and if I Google “wedding receptions” and one of the top few matches happens to be an article from your weblog, well, then I’ll visit your site, read your article, and, gosh, you sell wedding favors? Let me check it out while I’m on your site.
Behind the scenes, weblogs have their own search engines and “aggregators” too, search engines that operate on a “push” model: your blog notifies these engines (technorati, my.yahoo.com, etc) by sending out what’s become called a “ping”. The more you write, the more pings you send and the more your material is available to Web folk.
This has some great upsides in that the dissemination of blog information is remarkably fast. My best story: I wrote a blog entry about “Meetup.com” (read it here) and its switch from free to paid event organization, and *90 minutes later* the President of Meetup.com was on my weblog, adding his response to my article.
Put the speed of dissemination, the power and reach of blogs and the ease of spoofing a blogging system by generating pings together, and you have a “blog and ping” program, a program that produces automated content (data from RSS feeds, extractions from a database or similar) on a very regular basis, pinging all these different sites each time something is added, and ultimately polluting the blogosphere and the Web with irrelevant and uninteresting material.
That’s my take, at least, on how this all works.
Fair disclosure: I’m working on a ‘how to blog’ teleseminar series, I just wrapped up a book “Growing Your Business with Google” (it’ll live at findability.info when it’s published) and I run the Blog Smart! series of business blogging workshops, among other things. I also have four weblogs I maintain, on business, tech support, parenting, and personal finances.
Personally, I think the power and value of blogs are all about creating valuable content. It’s not about tricks, sneaky page structures, or any of that other “black hat seo” stuff.
You’ll have to make up your own mind, but that’s my current thinking on this topic.
Love it or hate it (blog and ping), but it works and will create a nice boost in your overall search engine rankings.
Dave,
I tend to agree with you about how the blog and ping tools are being promoted (and many times being used)
If you use them to creat junk content or just flood your blog with other peoples articles to gain ranking that is wrong.
It’s wrong for a couple of reason. First it is damaging to the whole concept and idea of a blog. They are to express your ideas and thoughts not repeat other peoples ideas and thoughs. If such blog flooding continues it will damage bloging by lowering public concept of their relevance.
Second, such use leads over crowding of the net. I don’t think we need the same content shoved at us over hundreds of sites. To just copy articles already out there and plug them in is to just dulute real blog content by burying it in a flood of carbon copy articles.
I don’t however feel that such programs can’t be used properly. They can be a tool to help manage your blog. I do currently use what is a blog and ping tool and I love it. I don’t however just pull up tons of junk or unrelated articles to stick on my blog to push traffic and rankings. I use it as a tool to allow me to easly from one console search for articles that I may want to blog about as well as post articles to several blogs. From one place I can seach for articles, creat my own articles, and post to any number of my blogs all with out having to jump from one blog to another. I can time the posts as well as post the same article to more than one of my blogs easly, quickly, and with better content control.
So as usual the tool isn’t the problem it’s the improper use it’s being premoted for that’s wrong.
F Woodman Jr