For me the only goal at the end of the day is to be indexed by Google and Bing as soon as possible. That is happening for me on my WordPress sites without changing any thing with the ping feature built in. So in my opinion adding more pings to more places might get you indexed elsewhere and may help in other places, but if you over ping Google or Bing I could see them not appreciating that. So I don't risk it. Kind of the don't fix what ain't broke mentality for me.

My understanding is that WordPress has a built in ping feature by default, pingomatic I think? Either way, I have never changed anything related to pings on my wordpress sites and they all get indexed very quickly. One of them is indexed within a minute or two of going live. Only way Google is finding that so fast is through the ping, so I know it must be helping. I don't think it would be all the helpful to increase the number of times or properties of Google you are pinging. I have stuck with the built in default WP feature and it is working just fine for me.

This worked like a charm! The site is on something called Zend cart I think and I had to sort through several Controllers but eventually found all the metaTag stuff in there and added a metaDesc variable next to them, unique meta descriptions on every page! Thanks!

The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in:

<title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title>

In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect.

How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this: