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Indexing slow? Blame WordPress 2.8

Last night I was complaining that my Servicing Stop post was taking a few minutes longer than normal to get indexed – with such a time sensitive topic it’s critical that Google indexes and ranks the content within a few minutes.

@ducedoon pointed out that it might be because of a new addition to WordPress 2.8 which rather than sending pings when a post is published sends them once per hour in a batch process!

In an attempt to reduce the numbers of outbound pings a new undocumented ”feature” was introduced in WordPress 2.8 (this change is not mentioned in the WP 2.8 release notes).

Instead of notifing ping services every time a post is published or edited, pings are now sent once every hour, at the most. Every time a new post is published, WordPress checks if there is a ping batch queued to be sent within the next hour. If so, the ping is added to that batch. If there is nothing in the queue, a ping is sheduled to be sent after 3600 seconds (one hour).

Apparently this will be fixed in WordPress 2.8.3, until then don’t expect fast indexing or speedy distribution of your RSS feed.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 7:37am ON Thursday, 30 July 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.shanedj.com shane

    Lets hope this new release comes soon then, good find.

  • Steven Morgan

    Quite disturbing that they have such poor processes that things don’t end up being included in a changelog.

  • Dave

    @Steven you can’t argue with the price though ;)

  • Stropp

    It may be possible to find the bit of code that specifies the 3600 seconds and change it to 1 (or even 0.) If the batch is only sent if it exists that shouldn’t cause any problems and the mod will disappear on the next release which fixes the problem anyway.

    In some ways this is the aggravating thing about WordPress. There doesn’t seem to be any consultation regarding changes that fundamentally change the way some features work. And what’s worse is that you are essentially forced to accept the changes because of the need to upgrade because of security.

  • http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org.uk Phil Green

    On the plus side, your plan to rank for “servicing stop” is working :D

  • http://ducedo.com/ Stefan

    Thank you for mentioning me even though it’s @ducedo and not @ducedoon. :)

    I think it’s an important mater since it will, as karamell.net wrote, stop the real time web. Even though it’s just an hour delay this hour can make tremendous different on occasions.

  • http://affiliate4travel.co.uk travelaffiliate

    Good to know. Also… I am using a fresh install of WP 2.82 on a new blog and noticed that under the privacy settings the default is now to block search engines unless I say otherwise. Quite useful if I don’t want the thing indexed until I have “finished” the setup but still glad I spotted it otherwise I might not have known to switch the block off.

  • Tom Troughton

    It may be a hastle, but WordPress does so many things RIGHT, that I guess we shouldn’t complain.

  • http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk Luci

    That was a sneaky trick by WordPress, not entirely appreciated either! Thanks for the heads up, it’s good to know it’s something they’re doing, and not a problem elsewhere.
    Any news on when the next update will be released?

  • Longest Drive

    Why does it take so long for a data got indexed? :)

  • http://www.stendo.nl Stendo

    Why is it taking so lang?? Let’s hope that WordPress 3.0 is coming soon!!

    But to be honest: just like Tom says: WordPress is doing so many things great!

  • http://www.spinmedia.co.uk spinmedia

    you could use a plugin to cover your ping until the next wp release – i’ve used maxblogpress ping optimizer to good effect with 2.8 blogs. Theres a little marketing BS with the activation of the plugin.. but the plugin seems to work ok.

  • http://raventools.com alisongroves

    I’d like to second the comment/question of “when will 2.8.3 be released?”

    :)

  • http://www.tag44.com tag44

    Well you can’t blame WordPress directly there might be other possible reasons for that.

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  • http://silent-movie.ru Lter

    Same news to me!

  • http://www.techiezine.com drew

    Insightful but right now I'm having major issues with TZ. We're doing our best too and as publishers of news stories we need Google to come back to indexing us the way they did before but they haven't been for around 4 days. The homepage is cached with our latest posts but no posts. Any ideas on that?

  • http://talkwarcraft.blogspot.com Adam Mason

    Awesome post! I’m definitly going to share this on my Twitter :)

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