Does Blog Pinging Build Inbound Links?

I noticed in our web stats that visitors are asking whether pinging a blog will increase inbound links.

Here's the short answer: Pinging your blog does not increase the number of inbound links your site receives.

And here's the long-winded explanation:

Blog-specific search engines often rely on pings from blogs to know that a blog has been update. By pinging blog search engines, your blog's content will be indexed in a much more timely manner, which could lead to additional search traffic, which could, in turn, lead to new inbound links if other bloggers who found you blog's content interesting and link-worthy.

This only effects blog search engines like Technorati and NOT web search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, or Live.com. Web search engines will find the links to your site and give you credit for them over time without pinging.

Why Bother?

As mentioned above, it could lead to more traffic from blog search engines. This is most often the case if you're blogging about hot topics in the news where many people are searching for something you just happened to blog about.

Another factor at play is your blog's Technorati ranking. Technorati ranks blogs based on how many unique blogs have linked to a given blog over the past 180 days. If someone has linked to you but NOT pinged their blog, you won't receive credit for the link from Technorati. By pinging that blog of the person who links to you, you can increase your inbound links reported by Technorati, and thus ranking on the site. This will make your site rank higher for certain types of searches on Technorati, such as searches by tags. Technorati rank is also a metric used by ReviewMe.com to determine how much to charge for reviews from blogs, so maximizing your Technorati ranking can have a real impact on your blog's earnings.

How to Find Un-pinged Links

How do you find unpinged inbound links? Your site's referral stats are a good place to look. If you notice that you've received a link from a new site blog and it isn't showing up in your Technorati inbound links, you've found a pinging opportunity. We identify sites like this by running a filter on our referral stats to eliminate common referring sites like Google.com, making it easier to discover new sites.

A nice side-effect of this is discovering conversations about posts you've written that may be worth joining.

Another option is subscribing to a blogsearch.google.com search result for your blog's name, or for the back links to your blog. This is a great strategy for identifying Blogger blogs, which tend to show up on Google's search properties but not necessarily anywhere else if the bloggers aren't aware of the power of pinging.

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