Your Wordpress blog has a great feature called Update Services that basically alert a number of blog directories, content aggregators and social media sites whenever your update your blog. This is an extremely useful stuff as your new posts will be reaching millions of web users worldwide much faster than the search engine (search engines spiders will take some more time to crawl & index) route.

By default, Wordpress provides the update service provided by Ping-O-Matic which is a very reliable service. The option to alert the Ping-O-Matic service, is available via Settings->Writing->Update Services section in your Wordpress admin panel and this entry will by default have ‘http://rpc.pingomatic.com/‘ listed there. What Ping-O-Matic does is that, it in turn alerts a number of services to update your aggregated content on their sites.

In most cases the above set up is good enough. But as the number of social media and aggregator services are growing day by day and you may as well have subscribed to many of them. So instead of using a single service, you may need to use a number of them to directly ping the sites which need to be updated with your latest content. If you visit your MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog profile and see that your RSS feeds are not updated for a couple of days, you now have the reason behind the same.

The following are some of the ping services I use (updated via the settings option). I have seen some improvements in the area of udpating the feed after making this change.

Must have services

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping

Other services

http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Some of these links when added to your settings may accelerate the updating of your syndicated content at your favorite social media sites as well as major blog search directories. Please make sure that, everytime you sign up with a new directory or bookmarking service, their ping services are included in this list.

Feedburner PingShot

Feedburner has a bulk update service called PingShot under their Publicize tab. You must enable the PingShot service in your Feedburner account and also select all relevant update services there in.

Please keep in mind that if you have already selected a certain ping service in your Wordpress settings, you may not include the same in PingShot.

With the above changes, your content will be reaching millions must faster than you could imagine!