Thanks for a great article like this. I foolishly thought that having one ping is enough – but you got a whole loads of them. I’ve updated my wordpress to include the pings.

I owe u one!

Nash

Ping sites are sites that you use to alert various systems that you have a new post on your blog. You can add them to your WordPress configuration from the Setting|Writing screen at the bottom where it says “Update Services”. This happens automatically when you publish a post in WordPress.

I don’t think it would hurt to use them all. I’ve been using them all for a while on all my WordPress blogs.

The only time that you might encounter trouble, so far as I know, is if you did a massive automated multiple ping where you would ping each service 1000 times within a very short time period. There used to be programs around that would do this but you don’t see them around as much now.

RSS aggregators: I thought they are only for flagship blogs. But will work with them for niche blogs too.

I’ve not noted any problems with using the ping services with niche blogs. As long as you aren’t pounding them with multiple direct pings per article posted you should be OK. I wouldn’t recommend using them with ’supporting’ blogs after the initial indexing since you’re not looking for search traffic there. I’ve found that pinging will attract traffic to a site, not a huge amount, but some, depending on the keywords used for a post, while disabling it will keep a blog incognito.

On the RSS aggregators, this also helps with niche blogs since it’s a good source for links and a tiny amount of trickle traffic that’s essentially search engine pass-thru traffic. This means that the aggregator site came up ahead of yours in search and the visitor clicked on it first, found a link to your site with a short blurb and then clicked through to your blog. One thing to keep in mind is that some RSS aggregators do a visual inspection before approving your blog so if it looks spammy or Made-For-Adsense (MFA) they might reject it.

Digg and SU are nofollow links to my knowledge and aren’t that useful long term. However, Digg can be useful for initial indexing. Of course, traffic from these social sources is generally worthless so far as making sales.

So far as having social traffic for affiliate sites, such as those monetized with EPN or Clickbank offers, it doesn’t hurt anything but it doesn’t help either. Some sneaky people do use this technique to boost traffic ahead of doing a flip sales though.

1. If I am setting up a niche post NOT flag ship blog,
- do I need to use all these Ping services or only few. Does it hurt if we use too many of these
- do I need RSS aggregators
- I thought Digg, stumbleupon are not needed for niche blogs. But are they important for backlinks.

2. social traffic:
- I know not good for adsense blogs. But does it help with affiliate sites.

thanks.