When I first came across the 'blog and ping' technique a few months ago, I have to say I was a bit unsure of how useful it would be. After all, the very words 'blog' and 'ping' sound more like something my 5 yr old son would get up to in his school playground! Not a serious business marketing concept, surely? Of course, I've since seen the light and have started using the practice - but not to the same degree as I read some others have. 100's of pages here getting indexed... and thousands of pages there visited by the search engine robots.

About the same time I started to read about the fascination with such programs as Directory Generator, Traffic Equaliser and other mass-producing template software. Now, I have huge respect for the likes of Armand Morin who produced DG and other top marketers like John Reese who extol the benefits of TE, but like so many of these new web techniques, I have my reservations. Here's my take...

Google, Yahoo, MSN et al aren't blind.Nor are they philanthropic! People search online for information. Period. Yes some then get their wallets out and make a purchase but the initial activity is to seek out information to solve the surfers' problems, desires and curiosities. 'Information is king' is still true.

So if what people get when they click on the links in these search engines is a mass produced site with just a whole load more listings with the occasional rss-feed that's appeared on more sites than Anna Kournikova, surely surfers (searchers) are going to get hacked off and look for the information elsewhere. Which will eventually mean lost revenue for the SE. A page with yet more links isn't information! And most of the rss feeds are not unique and in some cases are not even relevant to the original search query. But the thing that worries me most about these 'AdSense-laden' copycat sites is that they leave footprints - that is because they are a template, the html code is identical in layout for all of them.

Surely, the big SE's are going to start wising up. If you produce 5,000 webpages and blast them into the search engines using the blog and ping method (or any other submission technique) - isn't that akin to spamming? No one doubts that Google and the rest of the SE's have the technology to detect if a page is made with one of these programs. My guess is when enough of their customers (the web-searching general public) start complaining that all their results return are pages of identical listings and the odd out-dated snippet (if they're lucky), these DR and TE generated sites are going to get dropped quicker than a bandicoot on nandrolone!

What ever happened to the 'information super-highway'? Sadly, I think this highlights a sign of our times - something for nothing (enter a few keywords, click & send, then wait for the checks to arrive) - the quick buck mentality.

Again, don't get me wrong... most of these programs and techniques are good and useful - but I think they are being used inappropriately. I come back to the point I made about the real reason for people coming online in the first place - they want data, facts, advice, knowledge. It's no coincidence that the internet was often referred to as the 'information super-highway'!

So let's get back to giving our customers - our website visitors - what they came for. By all means use Directory Generator or Traffic Equaliser if you must, and - yes - I highly endorse the 'blog and ping' principal, but use them for the creation and submission of content-rich sites people are going to come back to again and again. That way we will all get what we want - searchers get their information, search engines get relevant listings, AdWords advertisers get quality click-thru's, and webmasters get genuine visitors who'll be more predisposed to opening their wallet!

=================================================== Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first posted at www.whywebsiteswor k.com/articles. To learn more about the 'blog and ping' technique, check out these blog & ping video tutorials. ===================================================

About the author: Rudi Ashdown Marketing consultant specialising in helping UK network marketers make the best use of the internet. www.whywebsiteswor k.com/articles