At last count there were more than 100 pinging services available along several WordPress plugins.

Pinging, for the uninitiated, is the act of notifying a wide variety of web directories, search engines and RSS feed aggregators of a new or updated post on your blog. The more directories and search engines that are notified of your post, the more likely you are to attract visitors whilst receiving back links.

The question is, should you ping your blog? The previous paragraph makes it clear there are definite advantages to pinging, there are also definite disadvantages as well. Blog and website services that offer to ping your blog do so by linking as many directories and search engines as possible. Not all services are the same. Service A may have 40 directories, search engines and RSS aggregators on their books while service B has 50. Therein lies a problem.

Many bloggers look at ping services and compare their ping recipients. Ping service A has 40; ping service B has 50; the duplication may be only 10 so the blogger decides to use both services to ping their latest blog. What they have done is pinged 10 of those services twice. Thats ok occasionally, do it to often and you may get banned for spamming.

Using plugins can be a good idea. With plugins you can enter in the services that you wish to ping. This avoids the duplicate ping that may occur by using more than one blog and website service. When using a plugin there is one catch. Some plugins do not check for previous pings, so a simple act like publishing – with an automatic ping, followed by a quick edit for a spelling or layout change, may result in a second ping the moment you save again.

Use a good plugin and it will identify the previous ping and not ping a second time. My advice, where possible, use a plugin if it is available and only use a blog and website service to ping your blog after making a major change to the posts content – in those situations, you want the updated post out there.