Tonight, because of the writers strike, we bring you awards from the world of XML-RPC Pinging:

• The winner of the award for highest ranked blog without posts is ... Ping-O-Matic. (Last post: 30-Apr-2006!)
• And the least coherent description of why data on millions of blog post was lost goes to Technorati which was broken for weeks.  'Kinda.  For a few (cough) million people and a few (cough cough) tens of millions of posts.  Let us know if it hit you.'  (I paraphrase.)

Your Content, Your Rankings, Your Responsibility

I will tell you something you might not have thought about but is important: You are in charge of making sure that Technorati (et. al) know about all the links back to your content.  I won't go into why you care if Technorati (and the google-bot that crawls it all day long) has your backlinks - that is pretty  obvious.  I'm just going to describe the "normal" process and how it might break.

I'll tell you something else you might ought to know: you have to be in charge of your own pinging.

Utterly Normal Post and Ping

In the normal course of events this is what happens:



You post something to blogger (or WP or Joomla) and it causes an XML-RPC ping to go to (at least) Technorati.  Which indexes your page and everywhere you link and gives you love and all your outbound links love.  And then google crawls Technorati and gives mucho love-o.

(Note that outbound links part - it's key later on.)

For Technorati you can substitute Ping-O-Matic and you get 21 sites that accept the XML-RPC ping on a post:



Note that Ping-O-Matic pings Technorati and you may ask why everyone doesn't use just Ping-o-matic?.  One difference is that Ping-O-Matic only accepts domains and Technorati will accept a URL. Pinging the URL can be important because sometimes the spiders may miss your backlink if the depth is too great. Both services will allow you to ping more than once a day. I'm sure there is a limit on their tolerance, but we've done a lot of testing and haven't gotten any nastygrams from either source.

So Simple - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?



Some things we've found that can go wrong:

• Technorati loses the ping (cough)
• Packets are lost in the internet (yes, Virginia, it does happen)
• Your hosting platform says it is pinging but isn't
• You installed Oracle's PHP and the ping simply doesn't go out
• Your content platform simply doesn't support pinging

And I'm sure the list is much much longer.

Real World Example

We had a blog with low posting volume that was getting plenty of inbound links but wasn't exactly burning up the SERPS, but one day, around 200 posts in, we noticed that there was, essentially, zero Technorati traffic.  Which we thought was strange because it should have been geting some traction.  So we checked and it simply wasn't listed as having anything at posted or inbound.

We generated a quick XML-RPC pinger and smacked technorati with all our back posts.  Within 24 hours we were getting traffic.  Cool.

What Else Was Lost?

So we went to Yahoo, got all the backlinks to this blog, and pinged Technorati with them too.  Voila, even more traffic.  Plus our google search traffic went up because of better SERP positioning. Within a few days we had a respectable Technorati Authority score (at least compared to the zero it had been).

Not a Magic Bullet! 

Look, this is blocking and tackling.  And if it is something you can just schedule to do once a month or so then you can make it into a building block. Don was comparing this to making sure that you buy, on average, the least expensive office supplies that can do the job.  But I think that, since we're talking readers or sales, that this is part of what could give you an edge.  and every marginal sale you make helps you become stronger while your competition becomes weaker.

We've put ensuring proper pinging and registration on our checklist.  You should too - the time requirement relative to creating content makes it a no-brainer.