Ping (blogging)

Last updated

In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. [1] An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

Contents

A ping server may notify multiple services when pinged; [2]

Adoptions

Server adoption

The technology was first introduced by Dave Winer to Weblogs.com in October 2001. [1] [3] The site was powered by receiving pings from individual blog and podcast websites using weblogUpdates.ping() calls over the XML-RPC protocol. [1] The server protocol was later adopted by FeedBurner's Pingshot, Automattic's Ping-O-Matic, Google Blogsearch, [4] [5] [6] Källström's Twingly, [7] and others.

Open ping servers, like Moreover Technologies' Weblogs.com, let other web services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are also proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers, and most Content Management Systems and Blogs provide an easy way to modify Ping Services.

Client adoption

WordPress has included a ping client since its first release in 2003, [8] [9] which used Weblogs.com as its ping server until 2004. It now uses Automattic's Ping-O-Matic.

In 2005, Apple released Weblog Server as part of Mac OS X Server, which was based on the Blojsom open-source project and used Ping-O-Matic as its ping server. [10] [11]

In 2006, Geeklog added support for ping servers, using Ping-O-Matic by default. [12] [13] [14]

As of 2016, most blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Ping spam

The use of ping servers to direct attention to recent blog posts has led to a rash of ping spam or sping, which attempts to direct readers to web pages that are not, in fact, recent blog posts. Examples:

Creators of ping spam or spam blogs may hope to benefit by creating pages to turn up in web searches for popular keywords. Typically, an individual spam post links to some external page that displays Google ads or offers a product for sale.

Although pinging adds no value to a website's rank-ability in search engines, [15] it does help search engine Web crawlers discover content quicker, which may give it (the content) the visibility needed to attract traffic (often resulting in conversions such as sharing the website, which means additional backlinks, social shares, etc., which does help a website rank. [16]

See also

Related Research Articles

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.

The Robots Exclusion Protocol, commonly known by its filename robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

A trackback allows one website to notify another about an update. It is one of four types of linkback methods for website authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles. Some weblog software, such as SilverStripe, WordPress, Drupal, and Movable Type, supports automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing.. It may be done by posting random comments on other blog websites, or by copying other websites' content and using it on free-to-use publishing services like Blogger and WordPress or publicly accessible wikis, digital guest books, and internet forums.

WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists and Internet forum, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems and online stores. Available as free and open-source software, WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021.

A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software and content management systems, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Serendipity, and Telligent Community, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. Other content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, support pingbacks through the use of addons or extensions.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software packages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Mullenweg</span> American entrepreneur and web developer

Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing and founding the free and open-source web software WordPress, and its parent company Automattic.

A spam blog, also known as an auto blog or the neologism splog, is a blog which the author uses to promote affiliated websites, to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites or to simply sell links/ads.

Sping is short for "spam ping", and is related to pings from blogs using trackbacks, called trackback spam. Pings are messages sent from blog and publishing tools to a centralized network service providing notification of newly published posts or content. Spings, or ping spam, are pings that are sent from spam blogs, or are sometimes multiple pings in a short interval from a legitimate source, often tens or hundreds per minute, due to misconfigured software, or a wish to make the content coming from the source appear fresh.

Sitemaps is a protocol in XML format meant for a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs of the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

This is a list of blogging terms. Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialized vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious.

Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name and automatic.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

Weblogs.com is a website created by UserLand Software and later maintained by Dave Winer. It launched in late 1999 as a free, registration-based web crawler monitoring weblogs, was converted into a ping-server in October 2001, and came to be used by most blog applications. Web-services like Feedster and Technorati monitor Weblogs.com for its list of the latest blog posts, generated in response to pings via XML-RPC. The site also provided free hosting to many early bloggers.

<i>Serendipity</i> (software)

Serendipity is a blog and web-based content management system written in PHP and available under a BSD license. It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite database backends, the Smarty template engine, and a plugin architecture for user contributed modifications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geeklog</span>

Geeklog is open-source software that works as a Weblog, CMS or Web Portal." It is written in PHP and during its history has supported MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Microsoft SQL Server as a database backend.

Webmention is a W3C recommendation that describes a simple protocol to notify any URL when a website links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them. Webmention was originally developed in the IndieWebCamp community and published as a W3C working draft on January 12, 2016. As of January 12, 2017 it is a W3C recommendation. Webmention enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, referring to, or commenting on their articles. By incorporating such comments from other sites, sites themselves provide federated commenting functionality.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Winer, Dave (30 September 2001). "Weblogs.Com XML-RPC interface". 1998.xmlrpc.com. Archived from the original on 2004-10-19. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  2. ↑ Marchuk, Serge. "AllStuffWeb.com - What Websites does a Ping Service Ping". allstuffweb.com. Archived from the original on 2014-01-31. Retrieved 2014-01-03.
  3. ↑ Winer, Dave (2001-10-21). "Getting ready to flip the switch". Weblogs.com. Retrieved 2010-10-06.
  4. ↑ "Got blog? Will ping". Official Google Blog. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  5. ↑ "Ping Google Blog Search Engine". Optiniche. 6 October 2006. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  6. ↑ Rowse, Darren (2006-10-06). "Google Blog Search Offers Pinging to Get Your Blog Indexed". ProBlogger . Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  7. ↑ "Twingly RPC Ping API". Twingly Developer Portal. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  8. ↑ "So Close". WordPress News. 2003-05-22. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  9. ↑ Mullenweg, Matt (2003-05-27). "WordPress Now Available". WordPress News. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  10. ↑ "Apple Previews Mac OS X Server "Tiger"". Apple Newsroom. 28 June 2004. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  11. ↑ "Ping-O-Matic in Blojsom". 28 April 2005. Archived from the original on 2005-05-07. Retrieved 2022-05-30.
  12. ↑ "Sending a Ping in Geeklog 1.4". www.geeklog.net. 2005-11-25. Retrieved 2022-06-05.
  13. ↑ "Geeklog 1.4.0". www.geeklog.net. 2006-02-05. Retrieved 2022-06-05.
  14. ↑ "Geeklog Sees the Light". Ping-O-Matic. 2006-02-10. Retrieved 2022-06-05.
  15. ↑ Baker, Loren (2005-01-19). "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings?". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 2014-01-31.
  16. ↑ Moss, Alex (2013-04-19). "5 Basic Tips to Improve SEO and the User Experience". searchenginewatch.com. Retrieved 2014-01-15.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.