As soon as you push the 'Publish' button on your WordPress post editing screen, you want the article to get discovered by millions of people. The best way people can know about the article is through search engines like Google and Bing. So, the faster this search engines bots (robots) crawl our article the better the chance to get indexed on this search engines for relevant keywords.
For that, we have the 'Ping' service, which notifies search engines that you have published a new article or update an existing article. Once the search engine gets notified, their bots immediately will start crawling your website or blog for new contents. However, if you don’t ping the search engines, they will only look for new content or update on your website at a predefined time period.
If you are looking into the technicality of ping services, then it's basically an XML-RPC-based push service by which a website notifies a search engine server or bot about the new update on your website.
Luckily in WordPress, we have a Ping update service that works automatically when you publish a new article or update an existing article. Once pinged this search engine will start crawling your website and your new article will quickly get indexed.
WordPress Ping Update service
You can find the ping update service in the 'Writing' section under WordPress dashboard 'Settings'. Now by default WordPress notifies a selected few ping services. You can always extend the ping list by manually adding ping services.
Here is my list of working and must need WordPress ping service list. (separate multiple ping service URLs with line breaks). We have also created a WordPress Ping doc file where you can check the live status of each ping service (if they are currently active or dead links).
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://ipings.com
http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml
http://bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://ping.fc2.com/
http://blogs.yandex.ru/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/
http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
http://ping.rss.drecom.jp/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
Note that excessive pinging your post or page to this ping services could lead to a complete block of your website. That will cause harm to your blog than doing good. Only ping these services when you publish a new article or do an important update to one of your older articles. You can also use plugins like WordPress Ping Optimizer to be on the safe side.
Congratulation, you have begun the journey of search engine optimisation (SEO) for your blog. Updating the ping list is one of the first steps to get your article on search engines faster and reach out to more potential readers for your blog.
If you are looking to further speed up your WordPress site then read our article on WordPress performance tips, add structured data to kick-start SEO, get started with Google AMP and a comprehensive guide to better WordPress security.
If you have any doubts in adding the ping list to your WordPress site or found a new active ping service, let me know in the comment section below.