One of the most handy features of wordpress is that each and every time you publish a post, WordPress notifies the search engines and lets them know that there’s new content that needs to be indexed.  This notification system is otherwise known as "pinging" and it can be your best friend, or you worst enemy.

Unfortunately WordPress can be a little bit "ping happy", especially if you have a tendency to create posts and then go back in and edit them after they have already been published.  Each and every time you do this, wordpress pings the search engines and lets them know about new content.  The trouble is, if you go in and edit a spelling mistake, there’s not actually any new content to index.  If you do this over and over, the search engines will soon get tired of your constant notifications and flag your blog as spam and you do not want this to happen!

One way to get around this is to download the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer .  It has a handy features that allows you to change the frequency at which wordpress sends a ping, resulting in only sending pings when there is actually new content.

This is just one plugin of many that can help you to manage your blog more effectively.