Does pinging honestly work?

I ping my sites all the time and the only thing that seems to get the search engines back to my site is building backlinks. Opinions?

 

Ping works, but you should also use other methods to index websites/URLs.

 

Personally, I don't value pinging that much, but for the amount of effort it requires I still do it.

 

Ping definately works but as everyone said its not enough to get you tons of traffic and users.

 

Depending on who you ask and maybe even what day of the week you ask you'll get different answers.

 

Pinging is basically letting everyone know that something has been updated and they should check it out. This to googster means hey they are updating time to recrawl. This makes it seem like you are always updating content which googster likes so it can help boost you in the SERPs if you combine it with RSS feeds(ping them also), Bookmarking sites and WEB 2.0 props like Wiz said. I've usually bookmarked and did web 2.0 props and then pinged those along with the main page and it boosts my page up near the top. But if you don't keep at it you will see it drop like a rock out of the sky.


Adderus

 

Just like uncle wiz said, pinging will help if you combine it with others SEO method

 

It only works if you have your content on a feed. I've ping ponged every day and the content never got indexed. Add an RSS feed and ping.

 

Pinging is basically just a way to let the SE know you have updated you site.

So if you are pinging all the time without adding fresh content, you will be ignored more by them.

And as everyone else said, it's just part of the whole traffic plan, not the whole thing.

 

Pinging, Social Bookmarks, RSS Feeds

These 3 elements are absent from my traffic strategies. Am I missing something? I know what they're supposed to be helpful for, but my knowledge of basic SEO principles seems to suggest to me that these techniques are just not very powerful relative to the effort (or cost) of implementing them.

I must add that I tend to work on medium to long term rankings, and I would guess that these techniques are more relevant when going for short term trends style tactics?

 

Pinging - Automated software to do it for you
Social Bookmarks - Things like only wire to submit to multi bookmarking site
Rss Feeds - Plenty of mass submitters out there to automate this for you

So now you can focus on backlinking, comment spam is ok, but the value isn't really there anymore.