Ping Spam - Free Blogging Advice Tips.

Pinging can make true wonders when running a blog. However, when blogging for money or hobby, most of the bloggers don't know that they are playing with fire and can be called ping spammers.

Every time you click 'Save and Continue Editing' button, or edit the previously published post and click 'Save' - you are sending a ping. And now imagine that when working with a new post you click 'Save and Continue Editing' 10-15 times; this is not much when you are working with a long post, do many changes in fonts and colors, etc. But for the ping services it means you pinged them 10-15 times. An attempt for ping spam? Who knows: each of the ping services can have its own inner policies about what ping exactly to start thinking that your blog is a ping spammer. But this is definitely the game not a single blogger would like to play.

Because it can result in a ping service to simply block your blog and stop taking the new post feeds from it. We can talk a lot about if this is fair or not, but ping services are definitely not interested to re-digest one and the same content (or almost the same content) all the time!

NB: This ping spam issue is peculiar to WordPress blogs, however other blog platforms seem to have most of the problems with ping spam unsolved as well.

Ok, How to Check If My Blog Crossed the Line?

Ping services don't say when exactly they are sure you are ping spammer, but these 2 signs can be very useful for you.

#1. Check the online accounts of your blog in ping services.

Some ping services, like Technorati, have a very useful feature of running "account" for each of the blogs on their server. When you know the URL to this account, you can check the account of your blog and see how quickly the ping service is gulping your new posts from this blog.

For example, if previously this service has been catching the fresh posts from your blog every 24 hours and was publishing their digest on the server, and now got stuck for 3-4 days - this is a possible sign of the blog getting ping spam penalty. It's crucial to note that this is a POSSIBLE sign, because there are some factors that can also explain this sudden "gap in love" from a ping service.

#2. Check your ping list service messages.

If you are reading your ping messages (that say "pined successfully" or other tech messages), this information is another proof factor for you. The strategy is the same: if after no problems for a long time with a ping service all of a sudden you start getting messages that say that you have not been pinged successfully and no other traits of the problem (like a message saying that you have incompatible format of the ping signal or anything else) - this is another possible sign of the ping spam penalty.

These two simple blogging tips will help you to catch the problem on the early stage of its development. But if you want to prevent it, then you need either don't click 'Save and Continue Editing' at all (which is possible) or look for the special ping spam protecting solutions on the market.

You can learn more about how to fight ping spam at the interview done by Free Blogging Advice Guidelines educational project.