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Who Ya Gonna Ping?

Posted by Amateur Blogs

When you publish a post, do you always ping directory services sites?

Although you can automate this process in Wordpress (by adding the URL for the directories under Options, Writing, Update Services) when I first switched from Blogger to Wordpress I was only listing 2 sites:

• pingoat
• ping-o-matic

Since then I’ve learned the importance of sending pings to multiple sites as a way to increase exposure. But here’s the issue that I’m struggling with:

How many directories should you submit your feed to?

One school of thought
"Submit your feed to as many directories as possible to let blog tracking, indexing services, and search engines know that you’ve published new content."

Another school of thought
"Limit your submissions to just 3-4 sites. Directory services don’t like repeatedly receiving pings for the same sites. They consider this to be indicative of spam activity and will reject your feed outright."

I’m torn on this one. I eventually increased the list in Wordpress to 17 directories, but then spent several hours going through the list to remove the overlap. I was surprised at what I found. For example: my list included individual entries for Feedburner and Technorati. But I discovered that Ping-o-Matic sends a ping to both sites. So, should I keep individual listings for them when they’re handled by Ping-o-Matic?

I think I still have some overlap. For example, I’ve got:

• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://ping.blo.gs/

I think the first 2 items are the same. The last one, blo.gs, just got purchased by Yahoo. So, do I still need to leave it on the list or is it covered by the 2 "my.yahoo.com" listings?

What do you think? Is it just me or are other bloggers struggling with this problem? Which school of thought do you agree with? Which directory services do you use?