Tag and Ping Still Works

Tag and ping is one of the earliest blogging tactics to be exploited to the point of worthlessness. The highpoint of this is when Sean Wu released his Tag and Ping course in June 2006 and claimed that he’s making truckloads of cash with this tiny but powerful tactic. The world was sold.

According to the experts, all you need to do is to write new blog post, and your blogging software (WordPress mostly) will notify "ping sites" like PingOMatic to come and index your blog post. Since ping sites are actively visited by search engine spiders from Google / Yahoo / MSN, the theory is that your content will be found, indexed and ranked highly in search engines in as little as 48 hours.

How much of this is true and how much of it is nothing but marketing BS?

For a lot of marketers, the hype was enough to set them on fire. Soon, people stared dreaming of becoming Internet millionaires with little or no effort. For most of us however, tang and ping was presumed to be "dead" sometime around late 2006 – way before we started our first blogs. So does it even work today?

Since I have a lot of blogs scattered all over the place, I had the opportunity to test just tag and ping alone on a blog and see what happens. Here’s the verdict based on my traffic after 3 months:

• Tag and ping works – Yes it does, but to expect it to work like how it did almost 3 years ago is pushing it too far. There hundreds of thousands more blogs today than there was in 2006. The concept works, but the competition has increased.
• Indexed and ranked – Yes you can get indexed and ranked pretty well in Google with no other promotion for your blog, but it only works mostly for 3-word search phrases. My test blog showed over 68 pages indexed in Google with over 500 new visitors the first month from Google alone.
• Get rich quick – Unfortunately this is all hype. Tag and ping traffic and search engine ranking does not seem to last very long, so you need to put in much more effort to get links to your site if you want long-term search engine traffic.
• Any niche market? – No it will not work just as well in competitive niche markets where everyone and their grandma has a blog. In less tech-savvy markets where there are less bloggers to compete with, it works like a charm.

 

For one of my niche blogs, I got over 500 unique visitors with just tag and ping. That means all I did was write new posts (about 20 the entire month) and WordPress notified all my ping sites. Google indexed my site and started ranking it rather quickly for some long-tail keywords.

(Yeah I know Awstats isn’t entirely reliable, but Google Analytics shows stats above 500 too, so the traffic is real.)

Even if you never consciously did it, you’re already tagging and pinging your blog content. For example, in any WordPress installation (manual or via Cpanel), PingOMatic is already listed as your default ping site. Plus,tag sites like Technorati or Real8r can pick up your tags and link to your blog content without you every having to submit anything to them. All you need is WordPress and a good theme that displays your tags properly.

So you can say "tang and ping" doesn’t work but the truth is you are already benefiting from it. Just check your web stats and you’ll see what I mean.

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