Google Blog Search Adds Ping Service
Google has added a pinging service to its Blog Search offering. Dubbed Google Blog Search Pinging Service, now bloggers and blog providers (such as blogger, wordpress.com or blogs.com) can now instantly inform Google Blog Search of new posts and content changes.
Besides its own new Pinging Service, Google Blog Search uses other ping services to update its index as to when blogs are updated.
Sure, manual pinging is very 2003/2004 as most blog software pings automatically, but by using the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, bloggers will no longer have to wait for Google to crawl their blogs in order for new posts to show up in the Google Blog Search index.
By doing so, blogs get updated faster in Google Blog Search and Google can consolidate its blog crawling more efficiently.
Blogs can be manually submitted to the Google Pinging Service and most blog providers should soon start pinging Google automatically. From the FAQ:
Many commercial blogging providers may already be pinging Google Blog Search, so you should check with your provider. You may also either manually ping the service as noted above or ping us programmatically through use of the Google Blog Search Pinging Service API. Please consult the API documentation for information on how to set up clients to ping us automatically
So, should bloggers use both Google Sitemaps and Google Blog Search Pinging Service to update Google?
Yes, as there seems to be a separation currently between Google Web Search (Google Site Maps) and Google Blog Search (Google Blog Search Pinging Service).
If you’re currently using Google Sitemaps within Google, we encourage you to continue to do so. Google Sitemaps, a tool within Google webmaster tools, can provide you with valuable information about your site’s visibility in our web search results. However, if you’re a blogging provider, Google Blog Search Pinging Service can help you ensure your blog’s most up-to-date information is included in our Blog Search results.
If you’re new to pinging, you may want to know that Yahoo owns blo.gs, one of the earlier ping services, and a service like Ping-o-matic (owned by the parent company of WordPress) will update the major pinging services online.
For a complete list of quality services to ping, Jeremy Wright has a long list at Ensight (dated 2004).
