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
-
Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?
Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Can I leave off HTTP/HTTPS in a canonical tag?
We are working on moving our site to HTTPS and I was asked by my dev team if it is required to declare HTTP or HTTPS in the canonical tag? I know that relative URL's are acceptable but cannot find anything about HTTP/HTTPS. Example of what they would like to do Has anyone done this? Any reason to not leave off the protocol?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Can a domain name alone be considered SPAM?
If someone has a domain that is spammy, such as "http://seattlesbestinsurancerates.com" can this cause Google to not index the website? This is not our domain, but a customer of ours has a similar one and it appears to be causing issues! Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tosten0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How long we can keep 302 redirection for a webpage url?
Hi Friends, I have a webpage featuring a product. I have created a new domain featuring the same product and the page is under construction. I am planning to do 302 redirection from the new domain to the existing domain for the time being. How long can I keep the 302 redirection from the new domain to existing domain? Is there any fixed time period/ duration that we can keep the 302 redirection for a webpage? I am planning to make few more pages (privacy policy, about us, etc) from the new domain 302 redirected to the existing domain. Is it possible? If so, how long can I keep the same? May I know which redirect is safe to use in this case, 302 or 301 redirect?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zco_seo0 -
Can I Point Multiple Exact Match Domains to a Primary Domain? (Avoiding Duplicate Content)
For example, lets say I have these 3 domains: product1.com product2.com product.com The first 2 domains will have very similar text content, with different products. The product.com domain will be similar content, with all of the products in one place. Transactions would be handled through the Primary domain (product.com) The purpose of this would be to capitalize on the Exact match domain opportunities. I found this seemingly old article: http://www.thesitewizard.com/domain/point-multiple-domains-one-website.shtml The article states that you can avoid duplicate content issues, and have all links attributed to the Primary domain. What do you guys think about this? Is it possible? Is there a better way of approaching this while still taking advantage of the EMD?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClearVisionDesign0 -
Beating the file sharing sites in SERPs - Can it be done and how?
Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right? How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Can Using Google Analytics Make You More Prone to Deindexation?
Hi, I'm aggressively link building for my clients using blog posts and have come upon information that using Google Analytics (as well as GWT, etc.) may increase my chance of deindexation. Anyone have any thoughts on this topic? I'm considering using Piwik as an alternative if this is the case. Thanks for your thoughts, Donna
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebMarketingHUB0