PING and Spiders

Here is an interesting one that I have not encountered before. To what level, if any can the ability to Ping a website have in terms of SEO.

The site in question has thousands of pages indexed in Google, but when I try running ANY spider software (such as XENU) it times out - cant find a single page. I tried pinging the site, and I get a 100% loss.

At this stage I am uncertain if they are intentionally blocking the ability to ping, or if there is some other server issue at hand - but the real question is, could this blockage be having a negative effect on rankings?

It probably just blocks all "suspicious" traffic, and all unauthorised bots.

Without that, some sites can be hit for several GB of extra bandwidth per day, or even per hour.

>> could this blockage be having a negative effect on rankings?

The Ping command sends out a ICMP echo request message and in return expects to hear from the destination. But some admins block the ICMP echo messages in their firewall as a step to tighter security control. It will not affect the server's ability to respond to genuine HTTP requests and has no bearing on the SEO. No search engine robot pings ahead before making a HEAD/GET request to the target server.

Excellant, thank you for that reply, that is exactly what kind of answer I was hoping for.