#highest availability

Every website owner wants to ping more in hope to get maximum exposure and be indexed faster. But be smart or you get your website banned!

Wordpress' built-in ping function sends a ping on per-post basis. There are quite a few "huge" or "massive" ping lists floating around the Internet. DO NOT USE THEM DIRECTLY ON WORDPRESS SITES. Because the lists typically include a lot "pointers" which are redirecting your feed to a distributed cluster. A "pointer" means it is not a page crawler itself, such as (http://ping.feedburner.com). It just redirects your feed to other real crawlers in a distributed cluster (ie. Google's family sites: blog, country-basis search engines.... etc).

So you risk being banned on Google if you pinging your frequently-updated Wordpress blog to both Google and Feedburner. Those "huge" ping lists, are getting you to do exactly this kind of duplicated pinging! Using those huge lists you practically are pinging Google a dozen times within seconds on the same single post. Google do not like this kind of duplication and the system will put you on its black list within a very short time frame.

The trouble is not on the lists, but on Wordpress. It is the very nature of Wordpress. It has a built-in XML-RPC ping function which can inform a list of search engines and blog directories to come indexing your newly created or modified blog post. Nice isn't it?

So the challenge here is to create and maintain (yes servers can go offline at times, temporarily or permanently; you need to care the latter) a ping list that gives you maximal exposure, least risk on duplicated pinging, and highest service availability. We maintain our Wordpress ping list publicly and update it every few weeks. Get a copy there and book mark that page if you like to get "fresh list" time after time.