I have been submitting new articles every few days lately. It seems like none of them are getting indexed. Do I need to ping them or is it just luck of the draw which articles get indexed and how quickly? TIA!
Articles can sometimes take a real long time to get indexed. It's the luck of the draw - I've seen no change in results via pinging
Pinging always help in notifying the SE's of the update in your site content! This process is fairly automatic on a wordpress blog and so if you are blogging using wordpress... you need not do it manually, again! Regards, RightMan
If you are using WP use MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin. It automatically pings multiple sites when you publish a post.
What article directory are you submitting them to? If you're using any of the popular directories, especially those that are human edited (EZA, Buzzle) they should be indexed almost instantly. Lower level directories can take longer, but G should find them eventually and I think Pinging them is generally a waste of time. I would however, build a couple of backlinks to each one.
Just build a few backlinks to each article via blog backlinks and watch them get indexed very quickly. Or you can submit your article links to http://identi.ca/ and get them indexed within 24 hours. Hope this helps.
What I do is ping them, and then make them into an RSS feed using icerocket, and submit that feed to a bunch of feed directories. Works great.