I have my Wordpress site hosted with Hostgator. In the writings settings, I have a list of ping services that was recommended in this forum. I also have the XML Sitemap generator installed which, it's my understanding, also notifies Google. I have read so many conflicting things and I'm totally confused on whether I'm pinging too much, not pinging enough, or maybe I'm not pinging my posts at all since I'm doing nothing manually each time. Can someone please clarify this for me? I have no idea what to do at this point. Thanks
You do realize we're going to get a bunch of posters in here spamming their lists now, do you? All of the ping lists I've seen here include out of date urls and dupes. I've yet to see a single list that was actually worth something from this board. Wordpress "out of the box" pings pingomatic and they in turn ping about 20-30 services. Included in that list is Feedburner and Google. Beyond that, I really wouldn't worry about it.
Thanks for proving my point. *sigh* As noted above, wordpress already does this. There's no need to do it manually afterwards. And actually Pingomatic notifies Google's Blogsearch and Google's Feedburner, not Google itself. But it gets it.
I ping to all ping sites besides ping o matic, to be a rebel. But what gets my sites crawled is submitting my sitemap to google webmaster tools. (Using Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin)