In today's Google PR obsessed Internet world, everyone is completely focusing on getting in bound links to your site. While you should always be on a mission to get more sites to link to yours, you must not forget their polar opposites.

Remember, by having outbound links from your site, you are in essence "voting" for site you link to. This is part of entire ranking algorithm process for all search engines. The idea is, that if two sites are similar in content and design, a site with more links pointing to it would be considered more important by search engine.

So then, why should you help out any other site? Actually, by carefully linking to other relevant sites, you are increasing relevancy of your own site.

Pretend I have a pizza shop, and I am located in Anywhere, USA. It's a typical site that displays types of pizza, store location, hours, and coupons. I also know power of outbound linking. For this case, I am going to link to 10 sites: Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Ceaser’s & Papa Johns. Next, I link to 6 sites that are physically located in Anywhere, USA. (And their physical addresses are listed on their sites.)

Now, I will switch roles and view site as a search engine spider. I navigate through site, and determine that this site is about pizza. Then I find a resource page and discover some well-known links (Domino's, Pizza Hut, Little Ceaser’s & Papa Johns - and as spider I know that these are major players in realm of pizza). Next, I find 6 links to sites located in Anywhere, USA.

It’s been all over SEO-student rumor mill for weeks now, and has finally made it into my Inbox – in droves.

The new get-traffic-quick scheme for search engine results has arrived – flooding ping notification sites with update announcements, even though your blog hasn’t been updated.

The question is does this- or some variation of it work? If not, where did this idea come from?

Okay, bad news first.

Pinging sites like Yahoo and Syndic8 every half-hour for several days or weeks, to notify of updates when they haven’t been made, does nothing but clog up system. It’s called spam-pinging and it has been around since 2002.

If you haven’t updated your blog, or you’re pinging updates of a site that isn’t even a blog (or RSS feed, where applicable), in long run it’s just going to make it harder to get listed at these sites.

In short run, you could get yourself banned from sites like Yahoo, though it isn’t officially their policy to drop sites for spam-pinging.

Yet.

True, not all sites that have recently updated lists you can ping to be on are set up to block pings of sites that aren’t updated. But they’ve found ways to block certain sites and users before – it’s only a matter of time.

So even in unlikely event that you could find some way to make this work temporarily, you’d just be setting yourself up to be dropped, in as little as a day in some cases.

So if this method doesn’t work, why are there tools available to help you flood these directories?

Well, let’s look at situation logically.

Until middle of 2004, certain adult web properties were able to create several bogus blog sites – in particular, blogspot.com. They’d found that links leading back to them from those sites helped their page rank in Google, as well as their search results placement.

Although Google got wise to them and closed this loophole by fall of this past year, several legitimate blog sites have found that they continue to enjoy high rankings for some keywords that are easier to get. Some people erroneously assume that it’s because their updates appear on Weblogs.com and/or in Blogger’s Most Recently Updated pages several times a day.