ExpressionEngine Pinging for SEO and Marketing

Posted on 8 May 2010 | by Ryan Battles

Pinging expressionengine.com whenever you post a new weblog entry just might help out your SEO, or at least draw more attention to your site.

Today I stumbled across a feature of ExpressionEngine that I hardly paid attention to before. It started as I was reviewing my Google Analytics report for this website, and noticed that one of my top 5 traffic sources was from expressionengine.com.

Out of curiousity, I went to expressionengine.com, and tried to see all of the different ways one might get some links out of that website. As my target audience is businesses and organizations who are searching for an ExpressionEngine develper, I figured any link from the software's website itself was worth pursuing. As it turns out, most of my links come from my forum posts. This makes me realize that there are extra incentives to interacting with people on the forums. This is something I need to do more often, but that's another post.

I did notice that expressionengine.com has a section for most recently updated websites: http://expressionengine.com/showcase/updated/

I wanted to be on that list as much as possible, as I would then get more links back from expressionengine, possibly boosting my rankings, but at least potentially snagging an actual user linking back to me. It turns out that there is no "no-follow" attribute assigned to these links, so search engines should give them some weight. Anyway, how do I get on the list?

What you need to do is ping expressionengine.com whenever you update your site. This is done automatically when you change this setting:

In the control panel, navigate to Admin > Weblog Administration > Default Ping Servers
Fill in an entry for ExpressionEngine.com, with the ping url: http://ping.expressionengine.com/index.php
Click Submit

Thats it! Now you should be at the top of the list immediately after you publish a new post. I'm going to check as soon as I publish this entry!

Tags: expressionengine, seo

Comments (7)

Shotwell May. 20, 2010		Hey, that is a pretty darn good find! I gotta say I didn't think anyone actually pinged anyone anymore after technorati dropped off the face of the planet, but if EE themselves are still running it then awsome. ping.expressionengine.com added
vlado varbanov Jun. 14, 2010		does anyone know some other ping servers addresses other that default EE?
square peg web Jun. 26, 2010		Developing websites in ExpressionEngine used to be pretty affordable, but recent events have caused the cost of development to rise. The system has also grown tremendously in power, flexibility, and ease-of-use thanks to a new version and a plethora of… Read More
SEO Agentur Suchmaschinenoptimierung Trier Jun. 28, 2010		Tks Ryan for bringing the ExpressionEngine PING feature back to my attention. Greetings from SEO Agentur Trier, Germany.
V.T.I Jul. 12, 2010		I've started writing the blog so I do not know where get traffic,Today I learned a lot from your site to develop my blog.Thanks 4 Share.
sangsang Jul. 22, 2010		This is a very useful feature for bloggers. I have applied, check and found it very good. You can post using Windows Live Writer tool of MS, also features automatic Ping
Edward Dixon Oct. 27, 2011		it is important to ping every site which your blog is. "ping" it is poking the blogsite that you are still there