To Ping Or Not To Ping?

People have told me that pinging is hugely unnatural. So should we ping our links? Any comments?

depends really. factors include how quickly you need your new links picked up, how many links u have dropped to your site and its ' normal' link velocity. To be safe, consider what's normal for your site (hrefs is good to see what your sites velocity is) and relicate that.

I was actually thinking about whether Google may recognize that a link is unnatural if we ping it (except maybe WP, which is usually pinged).