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Pinging Your Blogs to Search Engines

Saturday, June 25, 2005

What is XML-RPC and how do I use it?

XML-RPC stands for XML Remote Procedure Call (say what? :)). Basically, it goes something like this:

You have a blog, like the one you are currently reading. If you want to get more people reading your blog, you need to get listed in the blog search engines and aggregators. You can get listed by submitting your blog. You also want to submit your blog each time you update it so the search engines list the latest articles. This is called "pinging" your blog.

On many blog search engines you can ping your blog through their web site by typing in the URL to your blog and clicking their submit button. All is happy and good.

However, the nature of a blog is that it updates quite frequently, even several times per day. Ok, no problem. You just re-visit the blog search engines and ping your blog again. As you can imagine, this can get tedious.

The solution is XML-RPC. This allows you to use a special method of communication to ping your blog without ever having to visit the actual web sites to submit them. In a more detailed answer, XML-RPC is a protocol where you create an XML packet and post it to a web site which supports XML-RPC to accept a blog for pinging. It can get somewhat complicated, but actually using the service is easy. Anyone can ping their blogs with it.

Now you are probably saying, "Great! How do I use XML-RPC to ping my blog?"

The answer is easy. Several blogging tools include features to automatically ping your blog each time you release a new post. However, if your blogging tool doesn't already do this, then you need a 3rd-party tool, such as Blog Blaster http://www.dummysoftware.com/blogblaster.html - a software tool which lets you enter your blog URL and automatically pings your blog to over 30 blog search engines by using XML-RPC.

To show you an example of an XML-RPC web service, try visiting the following URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com. You will see a simple message stating that only XML-RPC is accepted. This is Pingomatic's XML-RPC service (they ping your blog over to 12 other directories once you ping them).

Now that you know about XML-RPC, setup your blogging software for pinging (if it supports it), or just go download a tool and start pinging. People are waiting to read your blog!

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3 Comments:

  • Nice blog entry. I have blog blaster and use it all the time.

    By Blogger Vikram M, at 6:56 AM  

  • It takes far too long to manually ping.
    But Wordpress can be given a whole list and they will be automatically pinged on each submission.
    Be careful not to "overlap" ping submissions.
    Too many pings will get your IP address ignored!
    More Internet marketing info

    By Blogger alan, at 3:43 PM  

  • tfs...
    looks folkswhat i found...
    submit your blog to 20+search engines..
    see here-->http://myfundoo-blog.blogspot.com/search/label/blog submitter

    By Blogger FunBlogger, at 7:59 AM  

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