Introduction to Blog and Ping
New webmasters usally have to ages for their websites to get indexed by search engines. Finally, the Google or Yahoo spiders come along once, then maybe twice. They index the main page but somehow never get round to a deep crawl. A deep crawl means visiting and indexing the rest of your website content. This is usually what happens to websites within the first month of being registered and being put online.
However imagine this scenario. You have hundreds of fresh content pages all ready uploaded to your website. This content is hyperlinked properly with a your top-down menu structure.
Like any good webmaster, you have added an accurate and up to date sitemap but you still have to wait for the search engine spiders to consider your website important enough to fully index your entire website and include it in their massive database.
But there is a new technique which could force the Yahoo spider to index your new pages, and even your whole website, almost immediately, perhaps in as little as 2 hours!
This is a technique being actively discussed within Internet Marketing and Search Engine circles at the moment. It's known as the blog and ping technique
Blogging, has become an important tool for businesses looking to get their websites indexed quickly by the search engines. You basically use your blog as a content management tool and benefit from the added importance that search engines give to blogs.
Now, we are going to can flip this on it head and use your blog to drive search engine spiders to your website almost on demand!
Blog and Ping Explained
Now, we are going to can flip this on it head and use your blog to drive search engine spiders to your website almost on demand! We are assuming your blog is up and running and loaded with new content. So how do we get the Yahoo spider to come calling?
Yahoo
The procedure can be summarized thus: 1. Signup for a Yahoo account 2. Add your blog's RSS feed into your My Yahoo account 3. Post to your blog (add content 4. "Ping" Yahoo 5. Repeat
Adding you blogs RSS is feed is quite straight forward. Most blog software including Blogger automatically creates a feed. For instance one of the weycrest blog feeds is:
http://blogger.weycrest.co.uk/atom.xml
You can your blogs RSS feed by logging into your Yahoo account and clicking "Add content" then Select "Add RSS by URL" – next to the "Find Content" search box. Cut and Paste you Blog RSS URL into the box. Finally click the button "Add To My Yahoo." Once complete, you should be able to see you blog "headlines" by scrolling to the bottom of the page.
Add Content
Now add content to your blog. Observer good practicem right good content. Don't stuff 10 or 20 links into one post. That could most certainly trigger the spam filters and make things worse for your website. Stick to 4 or 5 links per post, keep relevant anchor text (these are links, after all). You should right around your links with decent descriptive content. While this strategy will guarantee quick indexing of your website through Yahoo, it does not require that you ignore good SEO practices or do something that will possibly trigger ormark your website / blog out as spam.
Ping Yahoo
Right this is the bit you inform Yahoo you have posted and hopefully the Yahoo spider will check out your content. To ping Yahoo you use the following address
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://blogger.weycrest.co.uk/atom.xml]
(replace the blogger.weycrest.co.uk part with your own blog URL)
This will automatically ping the My Yahoo page containing your blog's RSS Feed, and this essentially tells the Yahoo spider that it needs to visit the blog to update the content in its index.
Repeat
You can use this “blog and ping” tactic to literally transform your website from an ignored mess of thousands and thousands of pages into a hub that search engines visit every single day. Regularly add new content, adding a few additional links and then ping Yahoo.
-Boom boom boom boom.
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