What I meant to say was that pinging can be good for getting other blogger’s attention.

If you want to get noticed by Lorelle, then don’t worry. She already read your blog even before you posted it.

Is that a more accurate description? I don’t want to cast doubt on your abilities.

Pinging doesn’t work. Trackbacks don’t work. Haven’t you learned…I don’t need those. I work in strange and mysterious ways and I’m everywhere.

Thanks for stopping by. I guess pinging does work

Rich, Lorelle answered the question better than I could. I know that I’m not going to go back and update my excerpts for the posts that I missed for the most part. I may watch to see which ones are getting at least some Google traffic, and if any of those don’t have excerpts, or have Google snippets which are bad, I might try to improve them and see if it kicks the traffic up a notch

The issue for search engines is that they have already stored your older pages in their database. Getting those updated is painful, but does happen, especially if a new ping is sent for the updated page to search engines. Still, it takes time.

If you haven’t been writing good opening paragraphs, or using excerpts, start now and let the old ones just do whatever they do. If you want to update them, it won’t hurt anything and will actually improve your page rank by making “improvements” to the pages. But put your energy wherever it will work best for you and your blog.