Does the ability to ping a website affect rankings?

ping, website rankings

[nanasai]

Please help me on one issue that has been boggling me for a long time. My host server's firewall has disabled the ability to ping my website. My SEO has told me that if search engines cannot ping your website, it will hurt your rankings. Is this true? I contacted my host and they refuse to enable the ability to ping my site. Before I change my host server, I would need an expert opinion.

Thanks.

[jeremy goodrich]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

If a search engine can crawl your site, you are fine. If they can't ping your site, that just means they can't ping it - two different things.

Have you tried viewing your site with a spider simulator, or a spider of your own?

Check out Search Engine World [searchengineworld.com] for a few great tools and articles on the search engines. Scroll down on the front page, and click the link that says, 'spider simulator'.

If you can see your site with that, chances are, search engines can too - as an added bonus, it will do some basic on the page analysis for you.

Again, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

[nanasai]

Thank you so much. The spider stimulator you mentioned did spider my website and it appeared fine. One concern I have is that my website was not getting indexed for a long time, so we somehow managed to get the firewall to allow pings for a week. And boom we got indexed in google. Is that a coincidence, if not it probably means my SEO is taking me for a ride. Thank you so much for your suggestion again.

[jeremy goodrich]

Try searching here for 'everflux' which is the WebmasterWorld term for the constant state of change that Google's listings usually are in.

But - if for some reason the firewall was denying access to anybody outside a certain lan or something, that could have been an issue. Since the spider simulator handled it just fine, my hunch is that your SEO might not be completely honest with you.

Surf 'round here for a while, and check out the links on the Webmaster World home page [webmasterworld.com] near the bottom, those are some of the best sites on the net for things related to SEO and webmastering. :)

Happy reading. Of course, you'll always get fast and helpful responses to your questions here - but the site search [searchengineworld.com] (above) takes a bit of getting used to, so you can find what you need quickly.

Take it for a test drive, I'm sure you won't be board after reading a few threads here...

Cheers.

[nanasai]

thanks again. i really appreciate your advise.