Why blogs work well for search engine optimisation. This is a multi-faceted answer, but one of the reasons is the liking of the search engines for new content, and that a blog is the ultimate in updated content. Not only is it frequently added to but it even lets the search engines know when it is updated.

Yes, using standard blog software, when you press publish, the search engines are automatically “pinged” with the URL of the new update.

So when is a blog not a blog?

When it doesn’t ping.

There are a few websites out there that have something in a directory called “blog” that works to all intents and purposes like a blog, but doesn’t have the ping facility. So the effect is not the same.

The pinging is done via a Remote Procedure Call or RPC. You send a specially formatted XML message to an RPC server. If you write your own blogging software (as we have got for the Vertical Leap blog, because it integrates with Apollo), you can build this functionality in to the publishing process. This is how proprietary CMS systems from web designers can link into this functionality.

Technorati has a good explanation of the content of the XML here.

There are systems that you can ping that send your information to several different sites, including the search engines, such as http://pingomatic.com/ where you send to rpc.pingomatic.com. Of course, Ping-o-matic does allow you to do a manual ping, but having is automated is so much more efficient.

All of the specialist blogging platforms (WordPress, Typepad, Blogger etc) do this pinging automatically, you just need to check the functionality of content management systems to make sure that this is implemented so that you get the full benefit of the work you are putting in.

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