I get how pinging is useful for blogs but can you use pinging servies for normal websites everytime you update content? Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question but I am wondering why, if pinging really works, all sites don't use it.
basically yes - but the directories accepting pings are limited to a few ones the API you can get from Yahoo for the XMS-RPC you can make to Yahoo when ever a blog, feed or page is updated on your site is just for that I have used it for a whle - with zero results however i use regular ping to Yahoo for a long time with greate success - but only for blog and feeds some ofther sites/directories also accept pinging for once registered sites to signal updates