I wonder why some SEO guys suggest that pinging is no good and it's better to have engines to crawl the site naturally. What this opinion is based on? I ping some of my landing pages and they get indexed within a few hours... Then with some moderate efforts i see myself on 2nd page within a week for not too competitive words... please share your thoughts and if you can back it up with some references, would be helpful.
Well I have tried pinging many forum profiles for my site and what I have seen is that the ones that I didn't ping are indexed. It works for other people I just don't know why it does for me.
I ping my blogs so that the SE's know that a change has been made and to come on by, see the new content, and rescore the site if appropriate, or at the least, index the post. I don't ping profiles and such.
For backlinks, I prefer natural page crawling. While it might be slower, it's far safer to protect your website. When you create links too fast, you risk being sandboxed.