UPDATE: This post has been updated. I have removed claims that Pingler is a scam, since it is possible that there is something happening in the back-end, even though the front-end doesn’t reflect it accurately and is misleading.

I just discovered something interesting about the service Pingler. Okay, I hate suspense too, so I won’t leave you in it. What I realized today is that Pingler’s front-end leads me to believe it may not do any pinging.

Okay, my audience here is of all types, so let me back up.

What is ‘pinging’ anyway?

Pinging has long been a way for bloggers and website owners to notify search engines that you have a new page, or that the content on a page has been modified. The benefit is that the receiving search engine will crawl and index your page/site faster because it has specifically and immediately been notified of the change. This is as it seems, much faster than the alternative, which would basically just be to wait for whenever the search engine gets around to your pages which could be days or weeks or even months in some cases.

Ok, so what exactly is Pingler?

Well, sadly, it’s hard to say what it is at this point. But I can tell you what it claims to be. Pingler claims to be a service that will take a URL that you specify (your page that you want to have search engines re-index), and a specified list of ping services, and it will ping your page at each of those services to save you from having to do so manually.

So what’s the problem with Pingler?

There is a review from 2009 on imreportcard titled ‘Pingler Review: Legit or Scam’. The question raised in the review is whether or not webpage pinging is beneficial in helping that page climb higher in search engine rankings faster. To answer that in short, pinging search engines is still considered helpful in getting your pages index faster.

Tell me more

OK, so I’m a programmer and a geek. I like to know how things work and I like to look at code. I used Pingler a few times over the past few days to ping a few pages on some of my sites that I had recently updated.

After a few runs through I realized that it didn’t care at all what I entered into the captcha field. A captcha field is one of those annoying images with random, scrambled characters that you have to enter into the text field to prove you are a human and not a robot. Then I realized I could just completely leave it blank. Because I’m a curious programmer I decided to check out the code behind the page. It took about 5 seconds to see that Pingler is proving bogus feedback to the user.

Let me prove it.

When you go to pingler.com and enter a ‘title’ and a ‘url’, then click ‘Ping My Site’, you are taken to a new page where it starts outputting messages like

“api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2 – Thanks for the ping.”,

and 88 more by default, one for each ping service. Now, feel free to play around and enter whatever nonsense you want into the ping site list field and you’ll notice Pingler will NEVER fail. So you can ping “BlahBluhBlahBlah” and it will appear to succeed. OK, this one we could let slip by. We could just assume it’s up to the user to make sure the ping URL’s are valid and working, and that if the URL is valid it’ll be pinged, otherwise it’ll silently fail and we’ll never know. Not great, but fine.

So carrying on, I then I whipped up my own quick script to ping some search engines, ran Pingler’s list of services through my script, and realized that some of the url’s they have in that list result in 404′s, meaning they don’t exist anymore. Yet, Pingler says it successfully pinged them. Like, check out http://ping.namaan.net and you’ll see there’s nothing there. That means there’s zero chance that Pingler successfully pinged that url.

OK, so maybe it’s just a poorly designed tool and doesn’t catch or report failures? Well, let’s carry on for the real proof. You can follow these steps or just see the final result here.

• Go to http://pingler.com/
• Fill in the fields with a title and url (sure, make them totally bogus), and press ‘Ping My Site’.
• View Source and copy the whole page
• Paste it in the HTML field (top left) of http://jsfiddle.net
• Click ‘Run’

RESULT: So, if you know how to read Javascript at all you’ll be thoroughly convinced at this point that the front-end at least is bogus. Otherwise, maybe just “quite” convinced. But you’ll notice that you’re seeing the same output as if you had carefully entered a title, url and your handcrafted list of Ping services, thinking you were being really productive.

A brief overview of the code shows a basic Javascript loop set to trigger at a random interval between 0 milliseconds and 1.5 seconds, and at each iteration output the hard-coded response message (ping site url) + “Thanks for the ping.”.

So, it’s hard to know if any pinging is happening in the background, but the results given to the user certainly are not a reflection any actual pinging. For a more simple test, start the pinging, then disconnect your internet connection. You will continue to get “success” messages all the way through. It’s definitely possible that there’s code running on the back-end (behind the scenes) that is actually pinging servers. However, mimicking varied response times, and always posting the same success message to the user is a sign of low quality standards. So in the event that there is back-end code pinging servers I’d expect that code to have the same level of quality standards. Regardless, if I’m using a service, I want real, honest results, not a representation of what may or may not be happening in the background.

Conclusion

This is the free portion of Pingler. They have a Premium account option which costs $2.99 / month and although I haven’t tried it I have a hunch it’s not too different. If anyone out there actually pays for this service, give this a shot and post back your findings. So I can’t claim that Pingler is a scam since I can’t see what may be running in the background. But regardless, the user has no idea if servers are getting pinged or whether or not any of them were successful. To me that’s not all that useful. But, hopefully there’s some working back-end code back there actually doing soe pinging, but I’d like to see them update the front-end to be actual results representing actual pings.