I have often seen variations of the following statement.

In order to get your blogs noticed by the search engines, you need to tag and ping each post you write. If you have a Wordpress blog, you only need to tag the posts with relevant keywords, because Wordpress pings the directories automatically.

This is done using Pingomatic by default, as they offer an up to date list of directories: http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

Despite this service and advice some people still think it is worth adding a manual list of directories to the Wordpress box found in  Settings > Writing >  Update Services. But if that added list includes the same sites that Pingomatic ping to, you will end up doubling your pings and have your blog blacklisted from those pings sites without even realizing it.

So either use Pingomatic alone, or remove http://rpc.pingomatic.com (and other mass ping directories such as http://Pingoat.com ) from the manual list.

Another way you could be over pinging without knowing, is if you edit your posts within a few seconds or minutes of posting.

The automatic feature within Wordpress will update pings not only every time you post, but also every single time you edit and update a post. You may already be aware that you are supposed to leave at least 30 minutes between pings or you will be considered a nuisance pinger and could get blacklisted.

There are two plugins to prevent this over pinging by only allowing pings when posts are first published: Smart Update Pinger and MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. The latter also gets around the problem of future posts (via scheduled automatic blogging) only being pinged at the time of scheduling, not posting.

If you find you have compatibility issues with either of these plugins, you might want to write your posts as drafts until you’re totally happy that it does not need changes before publishing.

Either that or set a timer!

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