WebProNews

The common practice of "pinging" enables you to alert major blog indexes like ...

... weblogs.com, blo.gs, Yahoo, and others that you have updated your weblog. The result is that these blog indexes and the search engines that monitor them will "re crawl" your site and quickly scoop up your new content.

If you have a blog I suggest using Pingomatic to ping these various sites whenever you have posted new content. It can have an impact on your blog traffic and search engine positioning...but please please don't abuse it.

Tinu AbayomiPaul feels the same. He writes over at Search Engine Journal that some bloggers are spamming ping sites to achieve a higher search position and he is urging folks not to go there ...

"The good news is, you don't need to deluge the ping sites to get noticed. Doing so is often a waste of time, and may be a harmful one.

Your best bet for now is to continue to achieve your natural search engine position through blogging, basic search engine optimization, and a common sense approach to frequent updates."

Net - check out pinging, but be good.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.