I'm setting up a bunch of niche sites and each one has a site map automatically generated for it. Once I have the site up and running, is there any benefit of using a service like Pingler to ping the sitemap itself? Does it help you get indexed faster or does it help keep Google from only indexing half your site vs the entire thing?
I dont think pinging google will force google to re-crawl your site any quicker than normal. The site map is just a way of informing google of new or changed pages. However, I have not had any issues with regularly pinging google, even if the site map has not changed.
when you ping your site with google it comes in que in the same way when you ping the sitemap it lets google know that there has been some change on the site.
I wouldn't say its a bad idea, but i would suggest you use Google Webmaster tools instead of pinging Google again and again.
When pinging the search engines... It's best to make sure that the sitemap will be accepted... Don't ping them often. It only takes once if your sitemap has new material in it. Don't ping at all if you haven't made any changes. http://www.automapit.com/sitemapvalidator.html will make sure they are valid XML, that the size limits are in order, that the URLs in your sitemap will be accepted based on the domain name used, that you aren't pinging 'too often'. ...and it works no matter who makes your sitemaps.
I would say that google will index atleast your homepage in the first spider and flag which pages it will spider the next time. It can be useful to ping your sitemaps once you have created or changed a section of your website. If you continue to ping your website, you will just spike how much bandwidth you use with your hosting company...
Another point if you are using a solution such as Wordpress, they automatically ping the major search engines each time you add a new article or post. You can also add more ping services that they will automatically notify. Most sitemap plugins also allow you to manually request a visit from the search engine.
After pinging your sitemap check your Google webmaster central account for that site. What does the last submitted date shows? I personally recommend using Webmaster central.
A large number of pinging services avoid sending more than one ping a day for "X" domain regardless your script generates several a day, but I believe if you are able to ping directly it depends on your content and Google's algorithm decide on indexing or label a domain as spammer.
I read the original question and all the answers. I had the same question. It looks like no one is saying it is going to hurt your rankings. So we might as well ping the sitemap.