It isn't spam but it depends how often you do it. If you do it too many times a day you will be banned from the ping sites but that won't affect your rankings. Since you're using wordpress, check out the free plugin ping optimizer: maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo You can set it to ping only every x minutes, so if you publish/edit lots of posts/pages, you won't be seen as a spammer (since everytime you hit the publish button you will send out a ping, no matter if you just published a new post/page or edited it). The plugin also has a field where you can paste in your list of ping sites, which is really helpful so you don't have to manually submit your blog to all these sites everytime.