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Apr
26th

Is Anyone Asking Ask.com?

Posted in SEM, WordPress by User ImageDouglas Karr at 10:50 pm

Ask.com SitemapsYou may have noticed in one of my recent links that Ask.com and Live have joined into the Sitemaps standard. The term sitemap is pretty self-explanatory - it’s a means for search engines to map out your website easily. Sitemaps are constructed in XML so that they can be easily consumed through programming. I have a stylesheet applied to my sitemap so that you can see what information is contained.

Sitemaps and WordPress

With WordPress, it’s simple to automate and build your sitemaps. Just install the Google Sitemap Plugin. I am running the 3.0b6 version of the plugin and it’s fantastic. I recently modified the plugin and added Ask.com submission support as well. I’ve submitted my changes to the developer and hope he adds them and releases the next version.

Submitting your Sitemap to Ask.com

You can submit your sitemap to Ask.com manually through their site submission tool:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[Your Sitemap URL]

I was excited to see this and immediately submitted my site and began work on the plugin modification. I know that Ask.com recently overhauled their home page and got some press so I thought it would lead to some additional traffic.

Is Anyone Asking Ask.com?

Over 50% of my daily visits come from Google but I have yet to see a single visitor from Ask.com! I see a trickle of Yahoo! visitors and a few Live visitors… but no Ask.com visitors. In viewing some of the Ask.com search results, many of them look quite aged… much older (sometimes a year old) references to my old Domain Name and old articles. Perhaps this is a key reason why Ask.com isn’t getting any traffic? Do any of you use Ask.com?

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7 Comments »

Comment by no imageRick (SezWho)
2007-04-26 23:20:25

The last couple of times I’ve tried ask.com, I haven’t generated very good search results. Many of the links it presented were either not there any more or just really old. I didn’t know anybody was using anything BUT Google any more. At least they index on a regular basis.

Wow, nice Technorati ranking. Those are tough to come by.

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Comment by no imageThor Schrock (SezWho)
2007-04-27 06:49:18

The last tie I actually tried Ask was the first time I saw those monkey commercials of theirs. I found then that the results they return are no good. Interestingly enough, Technorati doesn’t consider them a top tier search either. You can search for your domain on Ask, and then ping Technorati with the results URL. It won’t blast you into the top 100, but its a free Technorati backlink!
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Comment by no imageKiltak (SezWho)
2007-04-27 15:31:22

I get 5 to 10 hits from ask.com daily (on my old blog)… and all on the same article…..

Let’s see if this sitemap thing improves our situation :)

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Comment by no imageNicholas (SezWho)
2007-04-27 18:35:48

Tell me about it.

I think the traffic going to my blogs are Google by a landslide, yahoo and live search a far second, and Ask is nowhere to be found.

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Comment by no imageGunilla (SezWho)
2007-11-29 09:54:28

Well I just found this blog now… but great stuff!
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Comment by no imageMK Digi (SezWho)
2008-03-06 22:47:11

I know this is an old article, but I just wanted to let you know that I found you through ask.com! Funny, isn’t it?

I use ask.com when I’m looking for something very specific. For some reason they always point me in the right direction.

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2008-03-07 10:36:04

MK,

That’s awesome to hear! I just read that Ask is laying off some folks and thinking of utilizing Google - but feedback is that their engine is very good on specific queries. I’ve not used it much, but have heard good things on the logic and algorithms that their engine is based on.

Thanks!
Doug

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