One of the things I’ve always liked about WordPress is the ability to post-date posts. In other words, I can post stuff and tell the system not to release the post until later… even days later. Obviously, this can solve several problems. What I didn’t notice, until just recently, is the ping systems have some problems.
1: On post-dated posts, they ping as soon as I hit ‘publish’ not when it actually is visible by normal means. This means I start getting hits on stuff I’ve not even released yet. Google-generated hits to scheduled stuff if what tipped me off to the problem.
2: Let’s say we have a new post that goes up. THe post has an error in it, and we edit the post. That’s two pings, right there.
3: On each repeated hit, several things happen; My web server and database server get pretty much pinned out, as it generates an XML file, designed to tell the search engines what’s going on on this site. Trouble is, on repeated editing, each edit tries to re-gen the list, and the database slows down to a crawl, making the site inaccessable.
What I’ve found is a neat little plugin that will solve all this. According to the authors;
**After you install MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer: [1]**
* When you create a new post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
* When you edit an existing post, it won’t send any unnecessary ping to ping services and saves your blog from getting banned by such services.
* When you post a future post by editing the time stamp, it will ping only when your post appears in future. It won’t unnecessarily ping many times when you schedule posts as WordPress does by default.
That second point is important to me here, since the Search engine traffic is our lifeblood.
Seems to be working well. If you’re running WP, in any version, you’ll want to look at this plugin. I’ll keep an eye on it and let you know how things work out.