Ping, Pinging, Pingback

In WordPress, as a practical matter a ping is sent to a pinging service which notifies search engines every time you have published a post on your blog. In essence, a ping gives Google an immediate invitation to crawl both your home page and new post. In many respects, a ping works a heck of a lot faster than a Google sitemap to update your website.

Technically speaking, a ping is a communication utility used to determine if a given IP Address exists or is reachable.

A Pingback, or trackback, lets you notify a participating external blog that you have linked to their post. But, this SEO blog recommends that you restrict your use of pinging to search engine notification in order to avoid the scraping of your blog.