We did a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for a client a while back that required us to setup a few new domains with blogging software. We used a variety of different blogging software and noticed something very interesting...sites that performed pinging were crawled within 1-3 days and indexed within 2 weeks. All of the domains we used were brand new. In some cases, keywords that we were focusing on were in top 10 search results in 2 weeks as well. Needless to say, the client was happy.
So, we added a pinging feature as part of our DotNetNuke search engine module. Seamus, our search engine aggregation module, generates a RSS feed for the entire DNN portal. Anytime a tab/page is added or updated and Seamus finds this change, if the "Pinging Service" is enabled, it will ping 14 different blog and feed aggregation services.
So you are probably asking how does this work. Well, we send a "ping" to these aggregation services using XML-RPC. It simply tells these services that there is new content available on your site and to check the RSS feed. These services then will consume the feed and add it to their index. This provides a contextual link (assuming you actually use good titles for your pages) from these service sites directly to the content on your site. Pretty cool, huh?
Currently the following services are pinged with our module:
- BlogDigger.com
- BlogFlux.com
- Blogsearch.Google.com
- BlogRolling.com
- Bulkfeeds.net
- Feedburner.com
- Feedster.com
- IceRocket.com
- Pingomatic.com
- Syndic8.com
- Technorati.com
- My.Yahoo.com
- Weblogs.com
- Weblogalot.com
As a test, we dropped our search engine module on a new domain on 3/16/2007. With no links from external sites pointing to this domain, most if not all of the traffic was from our development at this point, averaging about 3-5 unique visitors a day (probably me, the client, and one or more of our developers). As of yesterday, the site had almost 150 unique visitors. Not bad for 2 weeks, considering we have done nothing else to this site other than add 10 total pages of content. This site is off to a great start and we have not even started a linking or submission campaign. See the graph below:
Also, checkout the following post on Marketing Pilgrim about faster indexing through pinging Google blog search that collaborates our results.
Ready to see the power of pinging blog and feed aggregators? Add a pinging service to your DNN site and watch the traffic roll in.