Though not “Christian” sites, these are the three pings I have set for each post on my word press blogs:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

Here’s the question I have—do you see any value to those pings? 

I’ve never seen significant referred traffic from the sites I ping (none of them “Christian"), so struggle with the value of the whole thing.

Mike - I typically don’t ping any sites when I post (largely because I, like you, don’t think of it as having much value).

Two thoughts: 1) I wonder if the lack of referred traffic is because the pings aren’t targeted to a niche (thus my question about specific Christian sites which accept pings); and, 2) the increased number of links in to our blogs will enhance general search engine traffic to some extent (although I’m not sure how much weight Google is currently giving to general inbound links - again, the niche would seem to have some importance in this regard as well).

I started experimenting with Qumana yesterday. I noticed that it’s set by default to automatically ping Technorati - that’s what made me start thinking about pinging a more targeted set of aggregators and wondering what the value might be.

If there are Christian aggregators which accept pings (I don’t know of any myself), I wanted to see if a more targeted approach to pinging would be beneficial (especially since Qumana, which I’m quickly growing to love, will do it automatically for me without any extra effort).

Rob - playing off of Mike’s comment, I’m curious to know if you’ve looked at the resulting traffic you might be getting from Technorati, Bloglines, and the pingomatic sites?

I’ll bet the links from those sites don’t carry much weight at all with Google—Google is too smart for that.

IMHO ping sites were only valuable when the blogging community was small.

I think we might be surprised if we ever got a look at Google’s algorithms, but in general, I agree - links from an aggregator are probably one step up from links from a link farm (or at least headed that way).

But my thoughts have really been sparked only by the simplicity of the Qumana posting process. All I have to do is enter a site to ping once and then every time I add a post to a blog, the site is automatically pinged. It’s a 15 second process. Even if the results are not dramatic (which I wouldn’t expect them to be), it doesn’t seem like much effort. Tagging is also fairly easy in Qumana although you have to do it for every post (which is why I may not do it as I’m not particulary enamored of the tagging phenomenon either).

I also think that successful promotion of a blog may involve connecting with just the right person (or persons) who will have the influence within your target audience to spread the word.

For example, if Billy Graham was an active blog reader and had a blog, used Technorati and happened to see a link to one of my posts, read what I had to say, and blogged about it, would that increase my readership? Definitely. Would that make pinging Technorati worth it? Assuming that increased traffic is my goal, then yes, it would have been worth the 15 seconds to set Qumana up to ping Technorati.

Would it be worth it to go to pingomatic every time I post an article on the off chance that Billy Graham might see it? No. And that’s why I don’t ever do that.

But again, only having to take 15 seconds to set it up in Qumana seems worth it to me if the aggregator is targeted to the same niche as my blog.

The problem I see with Qumana (in this regard) is that it seems you can’t have different ping targets for different blogs. Since I have more than one blog and hope to grow a bit in that regard, I’m not sure if it will be entirely practical. But again, I’m experimenting.

Setting up ping sites is easy in EE as well - I guess for me it’s just the likelihood of gaining a reader through that channel seems slim.

Actually, I wondered for awhile if Dean was going to turn Blogs4God into a ping site.

If there were an aggregator for 1964 CJ6 Jeeps that accepted pings, would you be more interested?

I think that’s the issue - are there sites dedicated to my niche that accept pings? That’s where it becomes more interesting because I can be fairly certain that the folks visiting those aggregators will be interested in what I have to say and won’t have to wade through a lot of extraneous stuff.

I was wondering the same thing about Blogs4God just yesterday - secretly hoping that he had set it up to accept pings. Oh well.

I’d try pinging a Jeep site - but if after a few times I didn’t see any traffic coming from it I wouldn’t continue.

FWIW - (not sure if you knew) you can setup an EE site to be a ping target by using the Updated Sites module.

Hmm...I wonder if that might be something useful for the StoriesAboutGod site?

Thanks, Mike, for the heads-up about the Updated Sites Module. I had seen that but never really made the connection. I wonder if it could be combined somehow with Magpie to not only display sites that have been updated but also display the latest headlines (all mixed together would be the best). Just saw though that Magpie doesn’t handle multiple feeds, so they couldn’t be mixed together. Maybe reBlog (found a reference to it in the EE forums) would help. Now you’ve really got me thinking!

I think it would work great for StoriesAboutGod, especially if you could do something similar to what I’ve described above so it wouldn’t just be a list of sites that had been updated but have some content (e.g. article headlines) as well.

Hmm...I think the only site that would align well with SAG is http://shareyourstorynow.org.  They do have an RSS feed, but I think I’d have to create another page on SAG for it to show up on.  Not sure that’s really worthwhile…

Hmmmm .... what if I were to tell my story about God on my own blog but wanted to ping StoriesAboutGod as well?

The best approach I think would be if you had the ability to actually include the article I wrote on StoriesAboutGod (either in its entirety or at least with an excerpt and a link back) in the flow of the other stories. And then the ability to moderate so that not every story that sent a ping ended up on your site.

Of course, that’s a big challenge with EE right now (I think Robyn Sowell was working on a module to do that at one point).

I think we’re making the issue harder than it needs to be - a fair number of the stories on SAG are from author’s blogs, and they just copied/pasted them in.

Ahhhh - I didn’t realize that. I thought people just came to the site and entered their stories from scratch.

I use Feedburner to deliver my site feed, and it’s critical that I ping FB to let it know to reindex my feed whenever posting content. Since many ping sites provide your feed URL for spiders and other agreggators, it’s also likely that I’ve gotten some subscribers through these services that accept my ping and also display my feed to search results, Technorati, Findory, and etc. are examples of these kinds of sites. They don’t see my blog address, they only see my feed address, to to the machines out there that index me and (ultimately) drive traffic to me, it behooves me to let them know I’ve updated every time.

One thing I’ve noticed is that while I don’t get a lot of traffic directly from ping sites and aggregator sites, I do have a lot of flux in blog subscribership. One day it’ll be 80 subscribers, and the next it’ll be 150. Then it’ll be back down to 120 the day after that.

I figure these gained and immediately lost subscribers are folks who found my feed off-site and subscribed based on what they saw in the feed titles and excerpts. They subbed, the grabbed the content in their feed reader, spent a day or two perusing my articles, and decided I was not for them. These folks see blogs primarily through their feed readers, and they use BlogLines, Newsgator, Technorati, and such, to discover new content. They’re happy to add new feeds to their reader, but they’re just as happy removing them. In fact, for this audience, the reader is the thing. They want full text feeds. They don’t want to go to your site. If you don’t offer a full text feed, in fact, you might lose them (and I suspect this is why I lose them).

I’m considering offering an alternative full-text feed for just this purpose. I’ve been perplexed by the subscriber church on my feed, and I think this is probably the primary reason.

I plug in Feedburner and Pingorama into my blog writing tool and in my blog software and forget about the niche pingers because who has the time to ping all those sites? I once came across a list of about 150 pingable sites and experimented with pinging them. It didn’t appreciably impact my site traffic, but it did slow down my posting because the software had to ping those sites one by one. Feedburner and Pingorama both ping enough sites that I don’t have to worry about it.

By far the single biggest traffic driver to my site is Google--because Google owns half the search engine audience. People searching for stuff will find me on Google but for some reason Yahoo and MSN don’t index me well and those search engines simply don’t drive traffic to me. Not in the same ballpark anyhow. So, I have a Google Sitemap that gets updated every time I add a post, and Google also gets pinged as a result. So my pages are always pretty fresh in Google. If Yahoo and MSN had a sitemap/ping option, I’d use it (Yahoo sort of does, but it still has a horrible time indexing my site.)

I do get traffic from Technorati and occassionally IceRocket (two good search tools for blogs) but not as much as Google, probaby for the simple reason that there are not as many people using those tools.

And in the Christian world, most Christians don’t really think to search the blogosphere for content. So, until they’re “with it” enough to use the specialty search engines, it pays more to make sure Google has your number.

Sorry to ramble.

Rich
BlogRodent

Not exactly a ping solution, but let me toss in some food (or feeds) for thought… especially for the Delicious Christians among us.  If you’ll simply tag your own post, adding appropriate keywords, the new ‘BlewsWire’ will pick it up automatically.