"Blog and Ping" is a phrase adopted mostly by spammers. The idea that spammers have been using is to link to a bunch of sites or pages in blog posts (generally scattered all over the web), and ping those posts with various blog ping services.

The result is that those posts appear temporarily on several high traffic websites. It can drive some random clicks and temporarily inflate inbound link counts for spammers. Generally speaking, most of the links drop off very quickly and get lost in the depths of the zero PageRank web.

Ping services exist to inform clients and search engines that a blog has been updated. The backlash of spammer blog and ping is that these services are clogged with worthless spam, rather than quality results, and as more spammers adopt blog and ping tactics, pinged links become less and less effective at driving traffic.

Can blog and ping get you crawled? Of course. It’s actually a much better idea than using the search engine submit forms, but you’re better off embedding those links in a real blog post than a spammy one (real people might follow them and subscribe to your blog), and blog and ping alone will certainly not get your pages to rank.

What pinging does for you is expose your new post near the top of search engines and link lists that get pinged with fresh content all the time. In other words, your links will be on high PR pages for a very short time, and once they leave the high PR pages, they fall either to very low PR pages, or completely off the sites in question (most blogrolls don’t keep archives).

In other words, in order to drive more permanent backlinks, you have to ping posts that real people are interested in reading. If you’re running a legitimate blog, that’s good news, because it’ll really work for you. The ping process is a bit like fishing. Each ping is a like casting a lure, and hopefully, you’ll reel in subscribers and backlinks. But, like fishing, the quality of the bait matters. You can’t catch much with an empty hook.

For spammers without real blog content, blog and ping holds little advantage over the traditional link farm tactics, and you’re likely to cause problems for the sites you’re trying to promote.

Now for the good news: It doesn’t matter what sort of website you’re trying to promote, if you’ve got something legitimate to say (like company news, press releases, commentary on your industry), you can use the blog and ping method to attract an audience to your blog, and, consequently, your products and services. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others hire people whose job description includes regular blog posting. You can bet they didn’t do that without looking at the ROI of blogging.

Pros

    * Your customers can easily subscribe to your blog posts to stay in the loop as your company evolves.
    * Pinging posts can raise your over-all visibility on the web and draw new customers in.
    * If you ping quality posts, you’re likely to attract quality backlinks, which will help you perform better in the search engines. This isn’t true for spammers, however, because real people are deciding what to link to.
    * It’s very easy to start blogging. Anybody can do it, without learning code.

Cons

    * If you don’t post regularly, your blog traffic will decline rapidly. Rule of thumb: Post as often as you want people to visit.
    * If you don’t have something interesting to say, pinging isn’t likely to do much for you.
    * Pings are not an effective way of driving up search rankings, automation style. Most ping services have extensive filtering and anti-cheat systems to stop robots.

Posted by Eric