I have to admit to being lazy and didn’t look at the link. This links is only relevant if a blog is not listed in Google blog search. I’ll update the comment.

I think we can safely conclude that it’s not meant to be used every time we publish a post.

I would definitely ping Google, only when you update your blog though. This will help Google crawl you content but the only way to increase the amount of pages you have indexed is by getting links back to your pages, this way Google can see you have some general popularity on the web.

Only use this ping if your site is not already indexed in Googles blog search results, check if you’re listed by search “yoursite.com” in google blog search

Not sure whats going on with the comments, the length shouldn’t matter.

Anyway with regards to directories it is really up to you, blogcatalog, technorati, fuelmyblog and bloglines are some of the bigger ones, the ones that carry the most authority. All I recommend is that you keep the links back to them as minimal as possible as you are losing link jice through it.

Pinging is an essential part of blogging and it works by sending a message to the ‘blog’ search engines to let them know you have new content – ONLY PING WHEN YOU HAVE NEW CONTENT – If you use wordpress you can set it up to ping automatically in settings->writing I think, or you can go to pages like pingmyblog.com or pin-o-matic.com to do it manually.

Hope this helps

Thanks for dropping in.

Submit to Google only once, however make sure you have some solid backlinks before doing so as Google may not index a page that is not being linked to. Submiting more than once is nothing but spamming and however told you to do it more than this is confused about the way Google works. Google will automatically check for new info on your site periodically, you can speed the crawling up in webmaster tools and you can also ping you r blog everytime you up date, this helps all search engines know you are publishing something fresh.

Hope this helps.

OK the reciprocal link issues is a tough one, yes some directories do insist on a backlink when you first want to be listed. I would recommend picking out 3 or 4 of your favourite directories and use them, you can always remove the reciprocal link after a few months. The blog directories do carry some trust but there not worth a permanent link back from every page of your site.

The fact that submitting your sites to Google will get you penalised is a myth, in fact Google actively encourages listing your site with DMOZ and Yahoo’s overp priced directory, its only the really spammy directories that will see your site seriously punished, the directories that were made to get links from with no care about site quality. Do not be afraid of submitting to the popular blog directories, this will not harm your site.

hope this helps

Thanks for your help.