I noticed MaxBlogPress has a plugin called the ping optimizer which I wish I’d been using all along. This plugin is a necessity for anyone running a self hosted wordpress blog, and therefore deserves mention to those of you who might have missed it.

A few months ago I edited tons of old posts, fixing the title tags and did several edits of each one. After installing this new plugin I learned how bad this pinging problem is. If I save a unpublished post as a draft, it pings!!!! If you have a blogger blog or a wordpress.com blog you won’t have this problem.

Is this the culprit which ruined my page rank? I turned pinging off on the plugin’s options. It lists what is pinged and what would’ve been pinged. Just working on one post (a draft) I was shocked to see what would’ve been pinged if I weren’t using this plug in!

Take a look at this (keep in mind, this is only a section of the pings…around 50% of what actually happened):

wordpress-pings.png

WOW!!!! Unbelievable. The day I edited most of my old posts probably pinged thousands of times. This will get you listed as a ping spammer quicker than you can blink. They really need to fix this. I believe most of the pings were caused by the autosave feature because I didn’t save the post that many times.

WordPress needs a global pinging control to say the least. Keep in mind, a post doesn’t have to be published to ping every service! Thanks to MaxBlogPress for giving us this plug in. I imagine that I’m listed as a ping spammer in many places. This plugin isn’t perfect but will certainly help! I leave pinging turned off and just do it manually through Ping-O-Matic.