A lot of the blogs will ping Google automatically with every post. There is probably a way to turn this function on and off. I know that Blogger makes it easy to find it. They know their members want Google pinged immediately.

For instance, if you are writing about breaking news stories, you can jump to Page 1 within an hour, if you remember to ping. If you wait a week for Google to come by, you may still make Page 1, but by then it is old news.

If you use Google tools, you can tell Google to index your site by telling it that you updated your site or blog. You can do that in many ways. I am always adding pages, so I update my sitemap, tell Google about it, and then Google comes by and indexes me. That is effectively the same as a ping.

Bloggers who cannot automatically ping their blog can use Google Blog Search which is still beta as of January 2009. That is why is not well known yet. If you look at the address, the very page is named "ping." They expect it to be used for pinging.

It may be new, but many of us could not live without pinging. Until recently, I was happy to wait until Google happened by. Now I am starting to write about recent events. Those articles receive most of their traffic in the first few weeks of publication. Pinging is very helpful to me.

I write for To Make a Site. I'll put this topic on my list. It will make a good article.