What are Fat Pings?
Fat pings are something you will hear more about in coming months as SEO gurus try to sell products promoting how much you need them, and how their ‘fat ping product’ will guarantee you higher rankings, blah-blah… Let’s cut to the chase. Fat pings from RSS feeds really are a wonderful thing and something you definitely need to implement on your website for better search engine optimization. The good news — we’re going to show you how to get them completely free.
First let’s answer what is a regular ping. If you have a WordPress website (highly recommended!), then every time you make an update to your site, it sends out a ping to RSS directories that a new post is on your site. The headline is what gets pinged. A fat ping publishes the entire content to the RSS feed, so you not only get a thin little headline but a big fat piece of content besides. Fat pings are great for SEO. There is a whole nerdy discussion about fat pings here, but we always look at things from a business standpoint. What can a fat ping do for your bottom line?
Fat Pings Verify Authorship
The greatest value of a fat ping, in our view, is that it provides authentication of authorship. There are bot scrapers out there that go out looking for content and then mash it up & post it on websites to imply they are the authors. With the Panda update, Google has done a pretty decent job of stomping on the autoposters and aggregators, but even so, what happens sometimes is a scraper will grab content from a poorly indexed site and publish it. But the scraper site is actually better indexed so that content — the forged content — outranks the original author’s content. This is where fat pings come to the rescue
Fat Pings Save the Day
Fat Pings distribute your entire article the moment you hit the publish button, sending your article out to Google et al. and securing your place as the rightful owner of the content. Google finds your content, your site gets ranked, people like you and not the scraped guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a nice system this fat pinging…
When you publish something on your WordPress website, it automatically gets published to the RSS feed on the site, and distributed and read by any subscriber of that feed. Depending on how highly optimized your RSS feed is, it may also get published to RSS services and picked up as content linking back to your site. Whenever we think of expanding the reach of our audience, we want to be aware of our engagement and our reach… A complete article would do a much better job of hooking a reader than just having a single headline out there, right?
So how do you implement fat pings in your website? If you have a WordPress self-hosted site, it’s super-easy. Just go and install the plugin for fat pings – found here. If you have installed plugins before, it’s very straightforward. But if you need any help, feel free to contact us.
Good luck with your pinging. Go fat pings and get quality SEO for your business.
