What’s New in Ping My URL – A Faster, Smarter SEO Ping Tool

Ping My URL is the free SEO ping tool on our website. You paste up to five addresses, press Start Pinging, and the tool notifies Google’s PubSubHubbub hub, Ping-o-Matic and Twingly that those pages are new or updated. On November 10 and 11, 2026 we shipped three releases of it (1.4.0, 1.4.1 and 1.5.0), followed by a cleanup of its code. This article explains what changed, what we fixed, and how we tested each change before it reached you.

The goals for this round were simple: make the tool fast for real visitors on our live site, stop it from pinging addresses that cannot work, and fix the errors some users were seeing. One rule came before all of them. The pinging itself took a long time to get right, so it had to stay exactly as it was.

The changes at a glance

• Every address is checked before anything is pinged. If it redirects, or its canonical tag names a different main address, the tool corrects it and tells you.
• Addresses that cannot work (a page that returns 404 or 410, a domain that does not exist, an address on a private network) are listed in red, and nothing is pinged until you fix or remove them.
• Addresses typed without https:// work again. From December 2025 until this update they were rejected, and every result showed “error”.
• An address typed twice in one run is pinged once.
• In our slow-phone lab test the form appears about four times sooner, and the tool’s files are now served from cache.
• The tool’s accessibility score in PageSpeed Insights went from 78 to 100, and it has an llms.txt file for AI agents.
• The ping services, and the way the tool calls them, did not change.

Every address is checked before it is pinged

When you press Start Pinging, the tool first asks a small check service where each address really leads. The pings start only after that check. If one of your addresses cannot work, nothing is pinged until you fix or remove it, so you never send half a batch by mistake.

Redirects and canonical tags correct the address

Pinging an address that redirects sends the services to a page that only points somewhere else. The check follows up to five redirects and corrects the address when the site itself says where the page lives:

• A permanent redirect (301 or 308) corrects the address to its destination.
• A temporary redirect (302, 303 or 307) corrects it only when the destination’s canonical tag names the destination as its main address.
• A canonical tag pointing to another address on the same site is used only when that address answers directly, without a redirect of its own.

The tool never guesses between the www and non-www version of a site. It follows only what the site returns. When an address is corrected, a gray note above the results tells you, in this form: “Corrected from [your address]: it redirects to [final address] — that address was pinged.” A similar note appears when the page’s canonical tag named the address that was pinged.

This matters most after a site migration, when old addresses redirect to new ones. Pinging the old addresses would only announce redirects. We cover the other half of a migration, checking what happened to your positions, in Track Rankings After a Website Migration.

Broken addresses are stopped before they waste a ping

Some addresses cannot be pinged usefully at all. The check now lists them in red under the box. These are the three cases and the messages you see:

• A page that answers 404 or 410, for example “Fix before pinging: https://onwardseo.com/this-page-does-not-exist-pmu-check/ — page not found (HTTP 404)”.
• A domain that does not exist, with a message ending in “— the domain does not exist”.
• An address that points to a private network, such as a local test server, with a message ending in “— the address points to a private network”.

If you paste several addresses and only one is wrong, the message names only that one. Fix or delete it and the message disappears while you edit, so you can press Start Pinging again straight away.

Sites that block the check are still pinged

Some sites refuse automated requests. A page behind bot protection may answer the check with HTTP 403, a slow server may time out, and some addresses use a non-standard port. The tool cannot confirm those addresses, so it pings them exactly as you typed them and says so: “Could not check the page (HTTP 403) — pinged as typed.”

The check service also has a fair-use limit. If it is reached, your addresses are pinged as typed, and the tool shows the notice “Could not check the addresses — pinged as typed”.

Why the check matters when you ping backlinks

The tool’s own title says what it is for: Ping Website URLs & Backlinks. When you ping backlinks, you ping pages on other sites that link to yours, and those pages change without telling you. A blog moves to a new domain, a directory reorganizes its URLs, an old page is deleted. Before this update the tool pinged whatever you pasted. Now a backlink page that redirects is pinged at its final address, and one that returns 404 or whose domain no longer exists shows up in red.

A red line on a backlink is useful information in itself. If the page is gone, the link on it is gone too. Note it, check whether the site moved the content, and if the link mattered, ask for it back. We explain why earned links from relevant sites are worth that effort in our article on natural link building.

Addresses typed without https work again

This was the most important fix. From December 2025 until this update, an address typed without http:// or https://, such as www.yoursite.com, was rejected with “Invalid URL format”, and every service in the results showed “error”. The form accepted those addresses, so nothing warned you before the run.

Now the tool adds https:// for you, so www.yoursite.com is pinged as https://www.yoursite.com, and the address check corrects it further if the site redirects. If you saw a full row of errors in the past year, this was the cause, and it is fixed. We also made sure that an address typed twice in the same run is pinged only once.

The tool loads faster for real visitors

Speed work counts for me only when real visitors on our live site feel it. Gains that show up only in a lab or on a test copy of the site do not count as a win.

The form appears before the script loads

The tool’s first screen is now built into the page in advance. The form is visible before the JavaScript has loaded, and anything you type in that moment is kept. In our lab test (nine runs alternating the old and new versions, with the processor slowed four times, as Lighthouse does for its mobile test), the form appeared after 141 milliseconds instead of 589. With extra network delay added, it appeared after 407 milliseconds instead of 778.

The tool’s files come from the cache

The name of every file in the tool changes when its content changes, so the files can be cached for a long time without the risk of serving an old version. They are now cached for a year, and the page itself for a day. Measured from my browser, the tool’s script and style files now arrive in 12 to 54 milliseconds. Before, each one took 45 to 218 milliseconds, and several hundred milliseconds when the server copy was cold. A request for a file that does not exist now gets a proper 404 instead of the tool page, so a cache can never store the page under a wrong file name.

The numbers in PageSpeed Insights

Tested on its own in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, the tool’s Speed Index went from 2.4 seconds to 0.8 once the cache was in place, and its first and largest paint from 1.1 seconds to 0.8.

The page that hosts the tool, onwardseo.com/ping-my-url/, already scored 100 on mobile and desktop before this work. The job was to keep it there while the tool gained new features, so after every release we ran five fresh PageSpeed Insights tests on the live page. After the last update went live on November 11, 2026, every run scored 100, with these medians:

• Mobile: First Contentful Paint 1.1 s, Largest Contentful Paint 1.4 s, Total Blocking Time 0 ms, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.
• Desktop: First Contentful Paint 0.3 s, Largest Contentful Paint 0.4 s, Total Blocking Time 0 ms, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.

Accessibility, phones and AI agents

PageSpeed Insights gave the tool an accessibility score of 78 before this update. It now scores 100. The changes help people who use the tool with a screen reader or on a small screen:

• The service and category switches tell screen readers whether they are on, off or partly on (a category with only some of its services selected).
• You can now zoom the page on a phone.
• Count labels and status text that were too light to read comfortably are darker.
• The page has a main landmark, so assistive technology can jump straight to the tool.

During review we also found that on a 360-pixel-wide phone screen, a long red message made the tool 171 pixels wider than the screen, so the page scrolled sideways. We fixed it before release. On the live tool the message now wraps inside the screen, and the Start Pinging button stays on one line.

AI agents read websites too, and PageSpeed Insights now checks how a page serves them. The tool has a new llms.txt file, a short Markdown summary of the tool with its links, in the format described at llmstxt.org. Two other addresses that agents look for now return a clear 404, because the tool publishes no agent resources. The tool passes all three agentic browsing checks that apply to it. Before the update it passed one of four.

What did not change

The three ping services, their timeouts and retries, and the order and pace of the pings are the same as before. Each address still goes to the ping service in one request, and the results still appear service by service.

We also tested a version that skipped a half-second wait in the ping sequence. I said no. That sequence took a long time to get right, and I did not want it changed for a speed gain.

The code behind the tool got a cleanup as well: 1,487 lines of unused code and configuration were removed. The script your browser loads stayed byte for byte the same, and the stylesheet lost the rules that only the removed code used, going from 20,796 to 19,654 bytes.

How we tested every change

My rule for this project was that the developer does not grade its own work. Every change was tested on a separate preview copy first, reviewed independently, and went live only after I approved it. The main checks were:

1. Real runs in a real browser, with real pings. For the address check that meant nine cases: an address that redirects, two addresses behind bot protection, a normal page, a page that returns 404, a domain that does not exist, an address on a private network, two addresses with one bad, and the same run after deleting the bad one.
2. A phone-width check at 360 pixels for the new messages.
3. Lighthouse runs alternating between the preview and the live tool, plus an element-by-element comparison with the live page, so nothing changed by accident.
4. Automated tests (256 by the end of this round), plus code style, type and build checks.
5. After the address check went live, the nine cases again on the live page, plus the server logs, to confirm one address check per run and one ping request per address.

After every update that went live, there was one more step, a PageSpeed gate: five fresh PageSpeed Insights runs on the live page, at least 60 seconds apart. An update passes only if the median score is 99 or higher and the medians stay within these limits:

• Mobile: First Contentful Paint at most 1.285 s, Largest Contentful Paint at most 1.551 s.
• Desktop: First Contentful Paint at most 0.509 s, Largest Contentful Paint at most 0.556 s.

Every update in this round passed. The address check went through a security review before each version shipped. It refuses to connect to private networks, follows at most five redirects, and reads only the start of each page, which is enough to find the canonical tag.

What pinging can and cannot do

Pinging tells services that a page is new or has changed. Whether and when a search engine crawls and indexes the page is that search engine’s decision. Google announced in June 2023 that its sitemaps ping endpoint was going away. Ping My URL notifies Google’s PubSubHubbub hub, Ping-o-Matic and Twingly.

For a page that matters to your business, also submit it in Google Search Console with the URL Inspection tool, and keep your XML sitemap up to date.

After you ping, measure the result

The effect of a ping shows up later, in crawling, indexing and rankings. If you check positions yourself, our guide on how to check keyword rankings accurately compares four methods and where each one breaks. If a page moves up and down in its first weeks, read Google Ranking Fluctuations before you change anything.

For ongoing tracking, see our SEO rank tracking service. If you need a snapshot only now and then, Rank Check Reports gives you a one-off Google ranking report for your own keyword list, with no subscription.

Questions about the update

Does Ping My URL still notify Google?

Yes. It notifies Google’s PubSubHubbub hub, alongside Ping-o-Matic and Twingly. Google decides on its own when to crawl and index a page.

How many addresses can I ping at once?

Up to five per run. An address that appears twice in the same run is pinged once.

Why did the tool change my address?

The address redirects permanently, or the page’s canonical tag names another address on the same site as its main address. The gray note above the results shows the address you typed and the one that was pinged.

Why does it say it could not check my page?

The site blocked the check (usually with HTTP 403 from bot protection), the server took too long, the address uses a non-standard port, or the fair-use limit was reached. In each case the address was still pinged exactly as you typed it.

Is the tool still free?

Yes. Ping My URL is free to use.

Try the new version

Open Ping My URL, paste up to five addresses and press Start Pinging. If something does not work the way this article describes, let us know and I will have it checked.