Speak to your Hosting Company

I know enough about PHP and hosting to get by but I was struggling to come up with explanations for why my blog pings didn’t seen to be showing up. One call and a quick chat and they diagnosed a reason for my blog not pinging. SafeMode was ON and this was killing the out going pings. One call and they had this issue sorted.

Use the FeedBurner Pingshot

One of the nice things about FeedBurner is the Pingshot functionality – if FeedBurner finds that your feed has updated they’ll do some pings for you. This is kinda simple just go over register, add your feed (add Pro Options to the setup). Once your set up click on the Pro options link and change your feed to be for search engines (this gets rid of the 302 redirect problem and changes them to 301′s – you gotta keep your link love going). Select Pingomatic and Google Blog Ping from the list of option in Pingshot and away you go (they now ping for you which is always good).

Test your trackbacks are all working

If you’ve done the above two steps and your still up to your neck in no pings going make sure you can get them working. Make an internal blog post and reference another post using the trackback address in the link. This should show up in your comments section of WordPress. If it doesn’t, and remember and check your Askimet files as your trackback may get listed in here by mistake, you could be up the river and have no paddle.

If after speaking to your host and are using the FeedBurner Pingshot functionality and nothings working I’d suggest going and getting a new hosting company. I use two main hosting companies and each of them has issues – both have the SafeMode issue.

Apparently the outgoing request file was about 2GB – ok so I do have other sites that weren’t pinging properly but they were still updating frequently in Technorati and similar places. Everywhere on the ping list is no doubt about to Blacklist me for being a spamming so and so (always nice).

Why were other blogs pinging and not this one?

The reason why the other blogs were pinging and this one wasn’t was because they were using FeedBurner for their feeds and these were thing using the Pingshot functionality.

So if your blog aint turning up in Technorati, Google blog search etc just rattle your feed into feedburner and let them do the work. Just remember to optimsie your feed for search engines, in your PRO account settings so that your links still pass link juice – as by default they use 302 redirects.