The Ping Effect

Back in September we were on vacation.   While had blissful real high speed internet so I could keep blogging in addition to scheduled posting, I neglected to ping my blogs for that three week period.  The simple reason for this is I simply forgot.   The effect of not pinging became apparent about a week into our vacation. 

Pinging is a very important component in blog promotion.  It is a way of letting blog directories and search engines know that you are still there adding new content to your blog.  Pinging helps to get your blog indexed that in return increases your traffic.  If you ping on a regular basis as I had been doing, the effects of not pinging is not noticeable immediately.  Rather the effects are gradual.  Unless you monitor your traffic trends it will take upwards of a month to start noticing a slight downward trend in your traffic.  Resuming pinging will not have immediate effects either so the effects of not pinging will likely last a month or more.

I learned a valuable lesson in blog promotion.  The good thing is in retrospect the decrease in traffic across all my blogs was minimum and recoverable likely because I had been making a point of regular pinging.  Resuming pinging solved the problem in a shorter period of time than anticipated so that was rather nice.  In future I will continue pinging even when on vacation.  Even pinging once a week during a vacation will take less than 10 minutes for all of my blogs while keeping the directories and search engines happy.

Garden Gnome
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