Can a Self-Hosted Ping Tool Hurt Your IP?

[David-Kley]

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?

[David-Kley]

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.

[LearnInternetGrow]

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.

[Mobilio]

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.

[David-Kley]

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?

[Mobilio]

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.