The technical and business reasons why the Blog and Ping process will not stop working with the search engines over time.

by Jonathan Leger
Creator of BlogBurner.com

Google's post regarding comment spam has a lot of people wondering two things: 1) does the blog and ping process constitute comment spam and 2) is the blog and ping process here to stay?

The short answers are: 1) No and 2) Yes.

Let me elaborate.

1) Does the blog and ping process constitute comment spam?

No. What Google, Blogger and other blog sites are trying to prevent has nothing to do with the blog and ping process. Comment spam is this: A person has a web site and wants to get it to rank better in the search engines. This person knows that Google ranks sites well that have a lot of links coming into it from other web sites, so they go out looking for free ways to get links from other web sites to their own site in the hope of improving their ranking. Since many blogs allow people to post comments about the blog entry, and since those comments usually allow a link to point to the comment author's own site, these guys go around posting all kinds of bogus "comments" to blogs in an effort to get a lot of links to their sites and improve their rankings.

This is not what Blog and Ping does. At all. Ever. Still think so? Stop. You're a fool.

Ok, ok, sorry about the fool part, but it always aggrivates me when people try to make blanket statements about what the search engines will and will not do, what they like and do not like, and how just because Google doesn't like this then inevitably they wont like that.

Google is trying to stop spam. Blog comment spam. People posting bogus comments on other people's blog sites for the purpose of artificially inflating the rankings of their own web sites. That's all. Period. It has absolutely no bearing on the blog and ping process at all.

2) Is the blog and ping process here to stay?

Yes. Here's why:

The blog and ping process is this: you post a few entries to YOUR OWN BLOG (not somebody else's) that link to pages on YOUR OWN WEBSITE (not somebody else's). Once the posts are made you inform the search engines that your blog has updated (you "ping" them). They come to take a look at the changes to your blog, and they follow the links to the pages of your web site. Your web site pages get put into the search engines index of pages so that people can find them when they do searches at the engines.

It's a very simple, elegant and brilliant way of getting your pages indexed. It is here to stay because of one simple fact:

THE BLOG AND PING PROCESS DOES NOT IMPROVE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS.

Got that? Just in case, let me say it again:

THE BLOG AND PING PROCESS DOES NOT IMPROVE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS.

One more time for emphasis:

THE BLOG AND PING PROCESS DOES NOT IMPROVE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS.

Blog and ping gets your site spidered, and very very quickly. But it does not improve your search engine rankings, or at least should never be used for that purpose. The problem that blog and ping solves is that the search engines don't usually deep crawl a site from the first page. Sure, they crawl chunks of the site, but how often have you had a site crawled only to have it stop after the first few pages and wait weeks or months to return again and get the rest? By linking to the individual pages in your blog and notifying the search engines of those pages, you get your site deep crawled.

This will never be a problem if your site is not a spam site. If your site is a spam site, there is always the risk that the site will be discovered for what it is and penalized or banned.

Google and Yahoo are at war. As of about November of 2004 they are both trying desperately to get the most content possible into their indexes as quickly as possible. They're crawling and crawling and looking and searching for new content. It just so happens that blog and ping helps them find it faster than they would on their own. They WANT the content, they NEED the content, they are at WAR for the content. Blog and ping gives them what they want. That's all. It's up to you to optimize your pages so that they will rank well. It's up to you to get links from other web sites to yours to help improve those rankings. Blog and ping has nothing to do with that.

I hope that clears up some of the misconceptions about what blog and ping does, and I hope it quiets down the nay-sayers who claim it doesn't work or will get you banned. All blog and ping does is point the search engines to the content on your web pages. The engines want this content, so they follow the links and grab it up. If you did your homework well and have optimized your pages well, you are rewarded with traffic to the pages.

If you never blog and ping a single page, the search engines will EVENTUALLY put your entire site in the index. But it might take weeks, it might take months, and sometimes it may take a year or more--I've had sites that were around for years that the engines never completely indexed until I blogged and pinged the deeper pages. Blog and ping makes everybody happy: the search engines because they get their content, you because you get your traffic, and people searching at the engines because they find what they are looking for.

End of story.