Ping vs Bookmark - What's the Difference

27 May 10 12:42 pm

Whew, that's quite a number of questions. Let me give them a try:

1) In her blog post Why You Should Ping Your Website and How to Do It!, Grace Harman describes pinging as "the online equivalent of waving a flag and yelling, “Hey! Over here – check this out!” to search engines and directories whenever you add or make major updates to the content on your site". Social bookmarking, on the other hand, "is like saving favorites on your browser, except that you're saving to a website that you can access from any computer in the world", and everyone can look at your bookmarks. So pinging is inviting the search engines and directories to take a look at your webpage, while social bookmarking is inviting people to take a look.
Yes, you can also ping and bookmark your articles that get published on directories. It is specially a good idea to bookmark them, for variety, as it would not do to bookmark pages that come from only one website (yours) in your social bookmarking account. It would not look natural and you may get banned on the bookmarking site.

2) I would not worry about the autoping feature of wordpress. If it was a problem then a lot of wordpress sites would have been "banned" by google by now.

3) I have only one recommendation for a ping service and that is for the Affilorama Website Ping Tool

4) When you sign up for a social bookmarking account it is more or less understood that you will be bookmarking pages on the web in which you find value and this means bookmarking pages that are not all your own pages. In fact, there are bookmarking sites that do not allow you to bookmark your own pages. That is why you need to bookmark pages from other sites; to make it look natural and not spammy.
You should choose to bookmark pages on your site that provide the most value as those would then catch the attention of people and encourage them to look at the other pages on your site.

Hope that helps :)

07 Jun 10 4:29 am

Social bookmarking relys on the social aspect to be effective. i spend a lot of time making friends, building up relationships with other people in the niche, bookmarking their sites, and leaving comments on other people's bookmarks on the popular sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, and delicious.

Social bookmarking is like a small add for your site with a backlink. it can help your rankings some, but the main thing is the traffic that you can get from it.

i can bookmark a page, or get others to bookmark it for me, and have traffic and sales before the search engines even index it. This only works if you
1/ build relationships with people on the bookmarking site, so that they promote your links, and
2) have great content on your site that people just have to share with their friends.
I find that they will then go and bookmark my sites.
also bookmark your content, not just your own site. I bookmark articles on directories, videos on youtube, and blogs within my niches, especially if it is my content.
i have even gone through some of the blogs that i had content from ama on and bookmarked them. probably the only links going to those sites. bookmarking your content will help build diversity of links in your profiles, as well as helping drive more traffic to your content, and if it is high enough quality, through to your site.
The key to good social bookmarking is great content. have content that your readers will want to share, and have a social bookmarking feature on your wp site. i recommend the Sociable plug in.

pinging is different.

when you ping, you are letting the search engines know that you have new content on your site.
Wordpress default pinging is not very good. it pings every time you update a page. if you are setting up tables or something, and you are checking the page, and tweaking your content several times, they get pinged every time.
eventually they will start ignoring your pings. you dont get penalized in rankings, but they wont come just because you rang...i like to say it is like the boy who cried wolf too many times.

however, pinging can help get your content indexed, as long as you dont over do it. The best fix is the CBnet ping optimizer plug in. i have about 20 sites in my ping list, letting some of the popular sites know that my content is updated.

17 Jun 10 3:50 am

here is my complete ping list that i use.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
"http://api.moreover.com/RPC2"
"http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2"
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
"http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php"

17 Jun 10 7:11 am

Okay... So why do you have so many ping sites? I thought all you needed would be to do one or two, since you don't want to over do it with the SEs?

Grady

20 Jun 10 5:21 am

Thanks for clarifying, bro.

Grady