To or Not to Ping Your Posts
I’ve recently read a couple of posts mentioning a plugin that will enable bloggers to stop pinging their blogs internally when deep linking within their posts.
This means that as they link to their own blog posts, they’re not sending pings to another post that they’ve linked to within the new post.
My question is why would you want to turn off this feature? And you may be asking why it’s important to keep it around.
What’s a ping?
Just in case you might be wondering, a ping is a notification a new blog post will send to an existing blog post when it has been linked to. For example, on my post All In One SEO Pack Finds New Developer, under the comments you’ll see the following which are links to posts that have linked back to my post.
Creating Connections
By having pings sent to previous posts while deep linking, you’re enabling a connection between posts. The pings display relevancy between posts and those who take the time to read and visit archives will notice the connections between posts by ping notifications.
Now having said that, I also believe that this connection is more prominent when pings and trackbacks are separate from comments. But for those with a self-hosted WordPress blog, separating comments and trackbacks is super easy. Check out this tutorial for the do it yourself approach.
Search Engines
Bloggers who utilize do follow will see an added boost in their posts from search engines as they crawl individual posts and follow from one post to the next. And should you be writing your titles with some keyword punch, it’ll be even more helpful.
Are you convinced?
If you’re not convinced that you should be pinging between posts, just stop doing it. Sure, you could install the plugin for this but there’s another way to do this that’s really very simple.
If you’re going to deep link without pinging, simply make your links relative instead of absolute. Here’s an example:
Relative: /2008/07/02/pinging-your-blog
Absolute: http://www.imbloggingthat.com/2008/07/02/pinging-your-blog
By dropping your full website URL, you’ll stop sending ping notices to yourself. Overall, without the weight of another plugin on your blog, this might be the better method.
Your Take
To ping yourself or not, that’s the question. So now I ask, do you allow internal pings on your blog and do you often surf the trackback links within a blog post?
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 am
I agree with you. We must choose the best option for this case. If we feel that it is good, we can do it but if we feel it is not good for other people, we shouldn’t do it.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:19 am
Going to all the trouble of installing another plug in does seem a bit silly when you point out the obvious benefits of pinging.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Thanks Katy! This is so helpful to me as I begin my static site to dynamic WP conversion. I also have been surfing Hack Wordpress based on reading about it in your blog.
This is all still new to me but from what I’ve read I think I would tend to ping my own posts whenever I link to another post.
I particularly like the tip of writing titles with key words. Sometimes I forget that.
Thanks :-)
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
@seo resources: Everyone has their personal preference, this is one of those times to go with what you feel is best.
@Nicola: There are some though that feel it isn’t right or has no long-term benefit. If it helps them, more power to them. Perhaps what I have pointed out they don’t see a benefit in but I’m grateful that you do. :o)
@Taryn: Hack WordPress is a great site and there are many more sites like Kyle’s that’ll help you pull together some really useful information about WordPress.
With regard to placing keywords in your titles, remember that you want them in the post too. I’d rather write a title that is appealing to my readers than a search engine. However, preference to that will depend on where your biggest traffic sources are.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
I think that is a great idea because internal pings clutter the page, in my opinion.
If you are using FeedBurner, your relative path may become a broken link. I know it’s true if you use relative path for image, but I think it is the same with relative link, but I’m not sure.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:39 am
When I first started, I used that plugin as the constant pinging was driving me insane….this was before I knew much (or anything) about internal linking.
Andy Beard pointed out to me that pinging is a good counterpart to “related posts”, as they dont always hit the same ones.
Now i use a plugin to keep comments and pingbacks/trackback separate for sanity’s sake (a lot less clutter)…..the only problem is, I have no idea where they go LOL.
July 14th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Certainly, this has to be handled in a case-by-case manner. However, I would agree with Hendry Lee…the pings clutter things up.
WIth regards to titles and keywords, I make it a point to align all page titles and post titles with the keywords I want the page to rank for. I even go a step further and insure the URL has those keywords and that they are featured in the content. This, however, is getting away from the focus of this blog post and into SEO stuff…