To prove it to yourself, go into the admin panel of WordPress. Under writing tab, and scroll down to the bottom of the panel. You will see in a text box, all your pingurls. every time you do anything which means edit, comment, save, schedule, post, or publish pages; as well as call up any log records via WordPress Plug-ins will cause WordPress to "announce" any changes whatsoever to ALL the ping services via the urls in this text box.

If you see any there, please cut and paste into a text file via Note Pad (Windows). Save it. Now go ahead and follow the directions for publishing, ect. When you have only one post left or page, then insert (paste) your ping service urls back into this text box. And make your FINAL action, which is "PUBLISH" or "Schedule."

Make sure you have thoroughly read your preview of your post, because if you change even a spelling error, you will have notified the services again. This practice you are attempting to avoid is known as "Ping Spamming." Which is to say pinging for no reason at all. The more you ping, the less trusted your site is in the search engine's eyes so to speak.

You see goonieguhu, following the above method, will make sure even when people comment on your blog, the ping services are at rest with your blog. They will not come by request. And the search engines will come to your site naturally and in perfect harmony to your publishing frequency and style.

As far as "smart Plug-ins, sure they will do SOME of the work for you, but they will still notify the ping services on every new comment, post, and page! What happens when you have 5 posts and 4 pages and 12 comments to answer to with? That's already 21 pings for every ping url in your list! That's going to be over (are you ready for this?) 1,000 pings a day!! You only need 50 (one ping for each service assuming 50 ping urls).

The plug-in is flawed, because it will not allow you to command complete control over when and exactly how many times it can ping daily. What would be really cool (and I'll talk to the developers on this one) is to simply schedule one ping only based on the arguement, <if no entry, 0;>0, set 1> TIMED ,(time and date set here). This is not the right syntax, but basically it says, if no new entry, ping zero times. If more than zero entries, ping only once at set time. To which the plug-in would control via the admin interface in WordPress.

This is what is missing. A litle php and editing of the WordPress Scheduling Script (wpcron)should be able to do the job. This is what is missing from all current "smart" plug-ins. My advise is for you to cut and paste and paste back as I have described. This way you leave no stone unturned, no chances for mistakes.

The second worst event that can happen is you forgot to paste the ping urls back into the text box. The worst mistake is you leave the ping url list in tack in the text box. Don't do this. Make a sticky on your screen for now to remind you.Use a simple 1,2,3 checklist and check it off each day if you are really paranoid.

But using the above plug-in will not stop your blog from abusing the ping services, because it still pings the parameters of new posts, pages and comments. I would wait until the developers take my recommendation as described above, before installing this type of plug-in. It is not fully though through as you can see.

After a year or so, you'll actually start to think, why even ping at all? But I'll leave that for another day. To your concern goonieguhu, you must remove all ping urls right after the install. This way, it's only the search engine's fault if they come and crawl for no reason. But pinging is like making obscene phone calls. In this case, it's not criminal, so they just ban your website after a while. Then you have no ping services to ping.

This is why everyone who uses CMS's as a web platform get's into trouble and can not index their content. It is just one factor, but a major fall back.
Later in the year, we'll get into "Optimizing your WordPress Blog for Search Engines." That's coming after I test all the plugins and see what they do regarding indexing and such.

The end result we are going for is a combination of originality of the website owner, combined with a balance of website management tasks which are handled through automated processes. (yawn!) Yeah, I know, but this is what is needed to get the edge in Search Marketing today. So stick around, because it's going to be alot of fun this summer here at BHW and Chase Global Media.