Can a Self-Hosted Ping Tool Hurt Your IP?
-
Confusing title I know, but let me explain.
We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates.
This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP.
Thoughts?
-
We are not using Wordpress for any of the tools, and all will be handled using PHP. This is a separate directory from our main site used strictly for the tools. Our main site does not use Wordpress either.
The server resources are not an issue at this time, as we have a very powerful setup.
I am not worried about how many times a subscribed user wants to ping their site. I am more concerned about where the ping is being sent out from and how many times.
-
First of all, there is no certainty that pinging a domain helps get it indexed, submitting a site map in the search console seems like the appropriate way to get that done.
I understand that if you ping your site when you update content it can let many sites, RSS feeds, and search engines know about it, but if you ping too much you risk getting blacklisted.
Second, it seems that using your server to send out many pings may slow down response time and therefor slow page load speed for your site which definitely has a negative effect on SEO.
Thirdly, if you can host the service on a separate IP, that would seem like the best course of action because if it gets blacklisted you can just start using a different one, don't risk your domains IP to get blacklisted.
Maybe, I'm missing something here but if you are using WordPress, doesn't that automatically create an auto-updating /feed/ URL for your site?
The following is from - https://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/pingbacks/
Granted I am using WordPress so that is mostly what I focus on. Are you using a different CMS?
How do I send out update pings?
Many services like Technorati, Feedster, Icerocket, Google Blog Search, and others want a “ping” from you to know you’ve updated so they can index your content. WordPress.com handles it all for you. When you post, we send a ping using Ping-o-Matic!, is a service that pings several different search providers all at once including Technorati, My Yahoo!, and Google Blog Search.
Pings are automatically sent if you have a public blog. If your blog is private or if you block search engines, pings will not be sent.
-
Yup!
Use "javascript" on client site to do pinging. Or Java app running from web as applet. Or Flash.
There are two major problems - javascript doesn't support cross-platform post without hacks. And not all computers comes with Java. Same is with Flash.
-
Thank you for your response. As to the IP getting blacklisted, since we have full server control we could always assign another dedicated IP address to the site. The issue is that we would not know if and when it happened to take such action. Obviously, we don't want to have to do this, and it could create headaches if the main site IP is blacklisted for our search position until we get it resolved.
We are also planning on adding in website submission limits. For example, you could only submit mysitehere.com up to 3 times per month per subscriber account. The only way they could spam the system is to create another account and sign up all over again. I doubt anyone would go through that much effort, but I could be wrong.
Thoughts?
-
TL;DR - YES
Long story - i'm author of similar desktop tool called SEOPingler:
http://www.mobiliodevelopment.com/seopingler/
so anyone you can use to ping anything. And bots are coming within second or two. This works perfect.The problem is when you use this to ping many URLs (like 10k-20k). At some time this stop working and ping API endpoint receive your request but i can't see that bots are coming. This mean that there is some threshold that if you pass it for IP and you're temporary blacklisted. I also heard (but i can't confirm this) that this temporary may vary due previous usage. For me this isn't problem because users can blacklist their own IPs. And they can use hotspot wifi internet or VPN for continuing pinging.
But on server this will be HUGE problem because you can't switch IPs on-fly. And no one can guarantee how long your IP will be blacklisted.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
White H1 Tag Hurting SEO?
Hi, We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO. https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok? Thanks for the help
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
Unnatural inbound links message from Google Webmaster Tools!
Hi Everyone, I just got this message from GWT(image below) This is probably a penguin Penalty. What is clear is I have to find the best and most efficient way to tackle this issue. We will probably lose tons of traffic in the next couple of weeks so I would like to get the best suggestions and maybe a guideline on how to do this in the most effective way! Thank you! 1a0X2M2a1h0A
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?
I recently noticed a jump in my Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Upon further investigation I found hundreds of the most spammy web pages I've ever seen pointing to my domain (although all going to 404 errors): http://blurchelsanog1980.blog.com/ http://lenitsky.wordpress.com/ These are all created within the last week. A. What the hell is going on? B. Should I be very concerned? (because they are 404 errors) C. What should my next steps be? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Has anyone had experience with the Disavow Links tool? If so did you notice positive results from it?
I recently noticed a large number of backlinks from low authority directories coming in for one of my clients. These links were either purchased from a competitor or from a directory service site that knows we might be willing to pay to have bad links removed. I've contacted the website admin and they require a payment of $.30 per link to have them removed from their directory. Has anyone had a similar experience? I'm also considering using the disavow tool but I've heard the outcome of using this tool is usually bad. I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Leadhub1 -
SERPs recovery? When can I believe it?
Here's a happy story: Some of you folks with sharp memories may remember my questions and worry over the last 3+ months regarding our fall into the abyss on Google after great positions for over a decade (we've always been fine in Bing and Yahoo). And our company name URL was still #1 so no site-wide penalty. Well......I've been working hard on fixing this in a smart way with all the ingredients I've been learning about. Thank you to SEOMozers for all the help!! There's still plenty to do, especially in the link earning department, but I've come really far from where I was in the Fall. Anyway. I am here right now to report what may be true to life fantastic news. I was starting to suspect an improvement last week, but it proved to be wrong. Then, I saw another sign yesterday but couldn't trust it. Today, my latest SEOMoz report is showing me the following for the several keywords we lost position down to "not in the top 50" for. keyword 1: up 44 points to #6keyword 2: no change still at #4
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gfiedel
keyword 3: up 46 points to # 4
keyword 4: up 43 points to #7
keyword 5: up 46 points to #4
keyword 6: up 2 points to #2 What I'm wondering is if this is real. ;o). I'm pinching myself. I realize that it could be one of those sliding readjustment things and we'll drop back down, but we are not a new site. It seems that even if that is the case, it still must illustrate something good. Some kind of elimination of possibilities for why the drop occurred in the first place. I did a few things in this past week that may have put it over the tipping point. One of which was signing up for adwords a week ago. I'm happy to give details if anyone is interested. A few specific questions: 1. What might this be showing me?
2. We have about a 45% number of anchor text footer links in client sites (we're a web dev co) one or two of which are numbering in the hundreds have keywords in them and are continuing to generate more links due to ecomm and large databases. I was gearing up to remove them or get them moved out of the footer so there's only one, but now I'm afraid to touch anything. Most of the footer links are just our company name or "site design". Any suggestions? 3. any other bits of advice for this situation are appreciated. I don't want to blow it now! Thanks!0 -
Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | blagger
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| | | |0 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
How Can I Check Competitors Linking Profile?
If I'm looking for weak points in my competitors linking structure, how can I use Open Site Explorer to do that? In other words, I'm not sure how to use Open Site Explorer? Zane
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Springboks0