I have few questions about "Ping"...Please answer....?

Question

Hello everybody,

I have a software which pings my web-pages to more then 100 ping sites. This software automatically fetch web-pages for desired keyword from my site and ping those to ping sites. I appreciate if somebody can answer my following questions...

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1. What is ping?

2. How does ping help me? (website ranking, indexing?)

2. Why Should I ping?

3. Which website should I ping? (Sales page, new website with lots of pages/contents, old website with lots of pages/contents)

4. Should I ping only a domain or all pages of my domain?

5. Do I need ping same URL more then once?

Please share any other information which you may have....

Answer 1

1. In Web authoring, a "ping" basically means you report to search engines, blogs, etc. that you have updated your Web site.



2a. A ping helps on the basis that by notifying others you have updated your site, you are prompting them to come view the new or changed content on your site.



2b. You should ping so that others know you have added or changed content on your site.



3. You should use a ping service such as Ping-o-Matic to automatically handle your ping needs. For search engines, it is generally best to maintain a decent XML-based site map that is structured in a way that suits that search engine. For example, Google Blog Search responds to pings; Google Search does not; MyBlogLog (Yahoo's blog search engine) responds to pings; Yahoo! Search does not.



4. You should only submit pings for things that are new or changed, as they are new or changed.



5. You should ping creation and changes as they happen. If you make multiple edits to content at a given URL, that URL will create many pings.



UPDATE:



The type of pinging you describe is spamming. You would probably be blacklisted by most sites that accept pings for what you describe.



Seriously, forget about pinging. Just put together a decent sitemap file, it will serve you much better.

Answer 2

1. Pinging is the sending of an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) echo packet to a host and waiting for a response.

2. Pinging helps you to determine if a website is up(in most cases). It also lets you know how fast the packets are being sent and replied to as well as some other information.(If you run pathping or tracert, you can find the path that the packet went through to get to you)

3. You should ping to determine if a host is up.

4. Which ever you please

5. Pinging only works on a domain. Only HTTP or FTP ,for example, really care about specifying subdirectories. Attempting to specify directories should make the command prompt throw an error as it would not know how to handle it (resolve the domain name through another protocol through DNS- most programs take care of this for us)

6. It would help to do that to make sure you have working results though it really is not necessary.

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I believe the actual terminology that you were looking for would be a 'web crawler'. A ping program would not make much sense because pinging only verifies that a host is up (or rather that a host is up and that it accepts ICMP packets as some sites deflect them though they are still up like siteadvisor.com). Google is an example of a web crawler. They work by caching your web pages every now and then (to ensure the most recent content). Web crawlers also look through the tags for relevant keywords.

Answer 3

1. What is ping?



PING is a command used to send packets to network devices. There are some default options that suffice to diagnose network connectivity.



PING is part of the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol), a set of network tools. When you use PING against a network device, your computer will issue several ECHO REQUEST (type 8) packets to the other machine, and that machine will answer with ECHO REPLY (type 0) packets to your machine. Before doing that you must be sure that the remote machine has the ECHO REPLY function enabled, as not all network administrators allow responses. If not enabled you will not receive replies and you could think that something's wrong.



So, your computer sends packets and then receives the answer, and the computer is able to tell you the time used to travel all the way back. And that should give you an idea of the status in that specific test.



For example, if you do a ping to Google:



ping www.google.com (ENTER)



Pinging 74.125.95.103 with 32 bytes data



Response from 74.125.95.103: bytes=32 time=202ms TTL=242

Response from 74.125.95.103: bytes=32 time=136ms TTL=242

Response from 74.125.95.103: bytes=32 time=183ms TTL=242

Response from 74.125.95.103: bytes=32 time=130ms TTL=242



Packets sent= 4

Received= 4

Lost= 0



Min=130ms

Max= 202ms

Avg=162ms



TTL stands for Time To Live. If a packet's answer is not received after that time then it will be discarded and a new one will be sent, and we will have one packet lost.



2. How does ping help me? (website ranking, indexing?)



Pinging to a site will not help you in website ranking because is not counting hits to your site, websites receive connections on port number 80 (and others) but PING is a different thing as I already explained. It won't help you indexing neither. Ping just checks that a machine is being reached and how long it took to go there and come back.



Ping results will help you as a checklist:



- the machine is turned on

- the machine is connected to the network

- the machine is accepting echoes and sending replies

- the average time of the packets



If a machine stops responding to a ping command, then you could begin checking the previous list: is it on?, is it connected? is a firewall blocking ICMP traffic? is something wrong with the bandwidth?



3. Which website should I ping?



You can ping any DEVICE you want, not websites. Maybe several websites are in the same machine. So there's no need to ping twice.



For example: if mail.yahoo.com is hosted in one server, and answers.yahoo.com is hosted in the same server then you do a ping to yahoo.com only. But if you know that they are in different machines then you should do a ping for each of them.



You could ping any website, regardless if their content.



5. Do I need ping same URL more then once?



Yes, that's recommended but the idea is not to overflow the bandwith with ICMP traffic.



Now my suggestions. If you notice that responses are taking too long, then there's another command that gives you more information than PING, and it's called TRACERT . With it you "Trace the Route" to a device, and you will not only see the amount of time taken but WHERE those packets are spending more time. You'll see, the packets "jump" from one device to another until they reach their destiny, that way you could see that they get to one point .. and they stop there, they can't continue, and you'll know where the problem is. On your local network, on your ISP, on the web server, etc.



I recommend you these nice tools: VisualPing and VisualTraceRoute:



http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Authors/IT_Lights_Software.html



Unfortunately the official website has been shut down but I have those applications and if you wish I can upload them on the Internet for you. Those 2 little apps will be handy. But you have to monitor "manually", I mean you have to issue the ping command.



If you prefer to do that automatically then I suggest to use AlertPing. You add the hosts you want to monitor, how often the ping will be sent and how you want to be alerted if a machine is not responding or taking too long. They have a freeware version available.



http://www.psgsoft.com/aping.htm



Now, if you want to do some PRO stuff then you have PRTG Network Monitor, which uses nice graphs to monitor your devices, and keeps logs. They have a free version as well:



official site:

http://www.paessler.com/prtg7



you can ask for a free key to try all the features, and after that it reverses to the free version:

http://www.paessler.com/prtg7/trial



Sorry if you think this a very long answer. I'm a networks and Linux fan.



Regards,

someone in Mexico.



LAST MINUTE UPDATE:



dang it! When I started answering this question there weren't any other answers. Now that I have finished one of my most elaborated answers, and after reading those other answers .. I come to find that PING now has another meaning ... why is that?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(blogging)



Anyway, I hope that our PING definition helps you too, so you can keep an eye on those servers :)



And yes, the other answer about verifying web contents updates is better in your specific question. Thumbs up from me too.



Regards.

Answer 4

Ping is the amount of time it takes for a message to travel from your computer to another (Such as a website), and all the way back again.



'Pinging' just means finding that time; it won't really do anything - but it is useful to show if particular domains are acting slow for you, or even if you can't reach the domain (Either the website is down, or you're internet connection isn't working as it should).



I can't really answer the questions because they don't make sense with this definition.