There is one WordPress Plugin that could make all the difference between success and accidental oblivion for your blog – especially if, like me, you often rewrite your finished blog posts.  WordPress contains some brilliant built-in functions, for example it pings new posts to your chosen blog services automatically every time you publish a new post.  When you write a new blog post, WordPress sends an automated ping to all those websites telling them there is new material on your blog.  All well and good when the post is new, but suppose you edit the post after you have published it? WordPress thinks the ping services will want to know about your revised post, but they will raise the alarm if you ping the same URL to them over and over again.  Your site could then be flagged up as a spam site – and banned by the ping services because of ping spamming. If you edit several already published posts, everyone will cause a new ping frenzy, unless you havea Ping Optimizing Plugin installed. Because spamming is an SEO technique that is used by black hat sites, and even if the mistake was accidental, you will still suffer the same penalty. The Smart Update Pinger and the  Ping Optimizer by MaxBlogPress are two Free WordPress Plugins that help you avoid making these mistakes, protecting your site’s position in the Search Engine results.  The plugins take over the WordPress standard update ping functionality. Instead of pinging every time you save a post, the Smart Update Pinger  and Ping Optimizer plugins only ping when the post has not previously been published.  You can also see a log for the latest pings, together with error messages, on the plugin’s options page. The author of Smart Update Pinger has said that he is not updating the Plugin any more but my log stats show that the plugin is still working for me.  Have a look at each of them and decide which one is best for you. But make sure you install one of these plugins to keep your blog out of trouble! And do not forget to download the WordPress Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin to maximise affiliate earnings from your blog.