Pinging: comments and questions

I'd like to ask a question and also make some comments on pinging. The main question I suppose to those out there pinging away with 3rd party tools (particularly for WP blogs) is why do you do it?

But here's my 2 cents worth
WP automatically pings when you post to it, so why ping seperately? Technorati in particular (and in my experience they are the best to ping to, to get your spider interest happening) is getting smarter in the way they pick up splogs, and if you're pinging away with a pinging program or similar, they're going to find out pretty quicky and ban your blog from their pages.

What I've found that works (and works well for me):
-Only ping Pingomatic, not Technorati directly, if you are pinging them directly they are more likely to pick up that it's a splog + it's less server and resource intensive this way as opposed to pinging a whole pile of different sites.
-Only ping via WP
- If you're scraping content, don't add it to your blog to often, I had a couple of sites scraping every 3 hours and they pinged Technorati as they posted the scraped content, they were all banned within a week. Usually I put the chron jobs on 12 to 24 hour cycles, at different times of the day as well for each one so it doesn't look to obvious to them
- Use unique IP addresses for each blog, I had a couple of blogs banned that were on a same IP address...it may have be unrelated but I've never had it happen since using unique IP addresses for each.

I'm also a fan of Technorati tags as well, there a nice way of getting some reasonable startup traffic to a new site, and often a good way of building incoming links from other blogs as they discover you site (naturally the site shouldn't look spammy either).

These are probably pretty white hat things in theory, but they are a good way of building longer term value from your WP blogs with scraped content as well

http://seo-compiler.blogspot.com