If you own a blog, you are probably familiar with the concept of pinging. In essence, when you publish a piece of content, you want to let syndication services such as Technorati to come and pick up on your new content. This is all fine and dandy if you do it moderately (don’t do it 5 times a day and when you have no new content as you will get banned). Pinging allows you to get extra links and traffic from around the net and who hates that, right?

It all looks harmless really. You publish content, you let others know about it, and you get traffic and links that can help you climb up the rankings. If you are just pinging sites such as Technorati, then you should be fine. But be aware of pinging tools that are out there. You have probably seen tools such as Pingoat. The problem with these tools is that some of the directories that are posted on them are unreliable. So you need to be extra careful which ones you Ping. I have personally had my site penalized for pinging the wrong service (a Japanese service). The truth of the matter is that there are many who don’t want to work hard to create content for themselves, so instead they steal your content (through web scraping). Sometimes, Google does penalize your site for that. You don’t get dropped by the engine, but you lose significant ranking. So you want to make sure you know the service you are pinging.