Why is this? Because blogs have the ability to “ping”.

What is a ping? In simple terms, it’s a short message sent from one computer to another over the internet. The second computer then bounces back a message to the first computer acknowledging receipt. The is where the name came from — it’s similar to a radar ping originally used by submarines in World War II to locate other ships.

When you publish a new post on your blog, it automatically notifies various ping services — pinging them to tell them you have new stuff they should know about.

Why ping? The blog services can then add your blog to their directory or to their list of recently updated blogs. This gives you some backlinks ( very valuable! ). These links can be used not only by people, but get noticed by search engines and social networking sites as well — thus giving you even more backlinks!

WARNING: If your blog uses WordPress, it can easily get banned by many ping services.

Why? Because WordPress sends a ping every time you edit a post. So if you’re making a lot of changes, it will send lots of pings, and could cause you to be banned for ping spamming.

It’s possible that your blog could be banned, and you wouldn’t even be aware of it!

What can I do? Fortunately, there is an excellent WordPress plugin available from MaxBlogPress that solves this problem easily, with little effort and no cost.

The webpage for the Ping Optimizer has a more thorough explanation than I’ve given you here. It’s really simple to install — I use it myself on all my blogs.

So go to MaxBlogPress right now, and download the Ping Optimizer plugin.

( another great script by MaxBlogPress )

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