JL Forums

If I'm not mistaking, when you add pinging services to your Wordpress Blog, it automatically pings when you update your post, correct? How often should you ping?

Pinging your blog too often will alert the search engines and you may be considered spamming…  Worse yet, you could even get your website banned!

Don't be too often Ping, Ping every time you publish new content and if we often Ping our website will be banned

Once you publish your post it will be pinged automatically by Wordpress. By default I believe it only pings to one site. You are able to add a bunch of other pinging services though. Just scroll to the bottom and add them in the box provided. I would put a bunch in there. Just do a search for pinging services.   

Some of these answers are "somewhat" correct, but don't tell the whole story. Here is a little more detail.

When you make a post (or update) in Wordpress, it has the function built in to automatically submit a ping to the site you have listed in your setup. Like TimeDweller mentioned, by default, Wordpress comes with only one ping site listed. You should add more ping sites to this list (do a search for them).

As several people mentioned, overpinging can be a problem. It is not just Google that you need to worry about when this over-pinging occurs. Most of the sites that are pinged are not Google sites. They are sites that Google visits frequently to "check up on" to see what new content has been posted to the internet. Google is constantly crawling these sites to find this info.

The real problem that occurs when you ping these sites too often is that they ban your site. That means even if you ping them again, the "ping" (indicating that you have new content on your site) will not be listed with them. And since it is not listed on their site, when Google comes crawling their site to find new content, it will not see your site listed, so it will not check your site out.

You need to take this into consideration when working on posts on your blog. Since Wordpress, by default, will submit a ping every time a post is updated, if you are editing a post and press "Update" frequently while you are making changes, you will be sending pings out every time you do this. I use Cbnet Ping Optimizer that kmmr12 suggested. It limits how frequently your blog can send out pings. You should definitely install this plugin.

As for saying that you should only ping once a day (max), this is just based on fear (not fact). If you post to your blog 5 times a day, this will submit five sets of pings. This is not going to cause your site any problems.

Trade Count has said it accurately, and I would like to add, if you want an easy to get, complete ping list, simply go to Pingler.  They even have a plug in that does it for you.

Have a great 2012