Blog And Ping To Become Bing And Ping

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

People don’t say it much any more, but “blog and ping” used to be the catch phrase when people first started learning to blog. Nowadays, every one blogs, but do they ping? If not, they should.

Ping services are services like Technorati that allow bloggers to notify the service automatically whenever a blog post is updated. Your blog software sends a notification to the ping service and the ping service publishes a summary of your blog post with a link so that anyone watching the service can visit with just one click. In the early days of blogging, this was a popular way to gain new readers to your blog. Now, it’s just another SEO tool as many ping services offer link juice for blog posts after they are pinged. But it’s also a great way to get indexed quickly at the search engines.

Bing is testing a new service that it’s calling Bing and Ping, but it sounds like just a marketing catch phrase as it really has nothing to do with pinging as it is traditionally known by bloggers. The Bing and Ping solution is simply a way for searchers to share what they are searching for on Bing with their friends. Is that a valuable thing? Certainly, but it isn’t really pinging.

When you conduct a search at Bing, assuming Bing actually rolls it out as a service, you’ll be able to share that search and its results with your friends by tweeting it, sharing it on Facebook, or sending it by e-mail. That’s nice. But will people actually use it?

Here’s one way you can use the Bing and Ping service to promote your own business (again, assuming beta testers like it enough to give it a thumbs up and Bing rolls it out publicly). Conduct a search for an important keyword to your business and if you are one of the top 3 results, share that with your Twitter and Facebook friends. If you hit the jackpot, they’ll find that search page a valuable search page and share it with their friends. Who knows? You may actually get some new traffic from Bing and Ping.

If you’d like to try Bing and Ping, you’ll have to become a fan of Bing’s Facebook page. The link is near the bottom of this blog post on the Bing and Ping service.