Can a ping really help your blog get the best search engine rankings?

It has been in the whole rumor of SEO students weeks ago, and has finally reached my inbox, en masse.

The new scheme of obtaining rapid traffic for search engine results has arrived, which floods ping notification sites with update ads, even though their blog has not been updated.

The question is does this work or any variation? If not, where did this idea come from?

Well, bad news first.

Pinging sites like Yahoo and Syndic8 every half hour for several days or weeks, to notify the updates when they have not been done, only obstruct the system. It is called ping-spam and exists since 2002.

If you have not updated your blog, or are pinging updates to a site that is not even a blog (or an RSS feed, where applicable), in the long run it will only make it harder to get a list on these sites.

In the short term, you could be banned from sites like Yahoo, although officially it is not your policy to delete sites to spam.

Still.

It is true that not all sites that have recently updated lists that you can ping are configured to block pings from sites that are not updated. But they have found ways to block certain sites and users before, it's just a matter of time.

Then, even in the unlikely event that you can find some way to make this work temporarily, you will simply be prepared to have it removed, in just one day in some cases.

So, if this method does not work, why are there tools available to help you flood these directories?

Well, let's see the situation logically.

Until mid-2004, certain adult web properties could create several fake blog sites, in particular, blogspot.com. They discovered that the links that directed them from those sites helped their ranking of the page on Google, as well as the location of their search results.

Although Google became wise with them and closed this loophole for the fall of last year, several legitimate blog sites have discovered that they continue to enjoy high rankings for some keywords that are easier to obtain. Some people mistakenly assume that it is because their updates appear on Weblogs.com and / or on the most recently updated Blogger pages several times a day.

And they are 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 on Yahoo, Google and MSN.

His frequency of updates had something to do with his rankings, yes. But that is not what guarantees that they are scratched, and if the blog is not configured to take advantage of the visit of the search engine spiders, they will not appear on the list.

To begin to understand how to get similar results for your site, you should look at the larger image. Spam will not, and as I said in other articles, there are other ethical, faster and simpler ways to do it.

So what is this bigger picture?

First, blogs have a natural tendency to rank higher in search engines because

Have a well structured site architecture
Make use of anchor text links
They are well linked,
They are updated frequently, and
They focus closely on a narrow topic, among other things.
Combine this with the ease of being able to obtain one-way links from various sites favored by search engines, and you have two thirds of the formula for a well-ranked blog.

However, the fact that these sites appear on the ping notification lists that are shown publicly and on other sites that are kept up to date with blog updates does not mean you can avoid pinging them without updating your site.

Nor does it mean that sites that have been updated and submitted authentically will appear on Google, Yahoo or MSN simply for updating frequently.

The good news is that you don't need to dilute the ping sites to get noticed. Doing so often is a waste of time and can be harmful.

And yes, by the way, there is an ethical way to enter search engines and achieve high rankings with a blog, but it is not a matter of volume.