[DUMB] what's the difference between "pinging" and "indexing"

Hey guise,

so what's the difference?

As far as i understand, indexing is just having your links found by google bot.

Then, what does pinging do and how does it help?

Pinging is just where you use a pinging service which is something that sends a notification to a seach engine that a page has been updated and the search engine bots neeb to come over and see.

Indexing is where the search engine adds that page to their index if they haven't already. Pinging can therefore help get things indexed.

actually there are 3 things to consider here:

pinging: sending a signal to the search engine you have something nice for it
crawling; the crawler of the search engine grabs the url and puts it in a database
indexing: the indexer goes to the url and indexes the content on it.

a service like linklicious for instance, just pings and makes sure the links are crawled. So you still don't know if your backlink is indexed.

Pinging is sending an XML-RPC request to places like:


Once they receive the notification about your new website page they will send a bot to check it out. If it decides that is worth indexing your new stuff then it's obviously what happens next, if not, don't worry it will get indexed sooner or later.