Ping Goat is Not Down

It seemed at first that Ping Goat, the blog pinging service, was down, which would be a real shame.

But it isn't really.

I think they basically got a little fed up with users simply copying and pasting the 'very long' URL, saving this as a bookmark and then once a week giving it a click, without paying any attention to their site - they do have tools!

Therefore you can fortunately still use Ping Goat to ping all your familiar sites: Technorati, Icerocket, weblogs &c. All you need to do is go to:

http://pingoat.net/

Notice it's a .net and not .com site now.

Simply fill in your blog details like you did first time you used this excellent pinging service and hey-presto your blogs just been pinged.

Fetch as Googlebot - Not Just a Gimmick

When I first seen the 'labs' button and 'Fetch as Googlebot' in Webmaster tools, I thought to myself what good is this? I can render pages in SERPs if I need to see if they're working or not - or can I?

By entering the page you want to check and clicking 'Fetch', if your page is available on the net Google will return a green tick and 'success'.











But that's not all - there may be something hidden.

By clicking on the 'success', you get a full blown view of exactly what the Googlebot sees when he visits your page.













Not very interesting if there's nothing to hide, but if something somehow got into your code, which you didn't intentionally put there, well, it could just save you, not only a headache, but also a little time in Google jail.