What's up with Ask.com SEO

Hey guys, I get about uhh nooo uniques from ask.. but the TV promo's have been makin' me wonder a bit lately, think they'll come up? How does one SEO for ask?

I've asked this in a few places, and it just starts a debate about everyone's favorite search engine... So Here it is. We all know that google has ask beat hands down right now..

What I wanna know is how to optimize a website for ask.com

~LadyH

 

Dose not ask just pull it's results from google ?
This is an older article not sure if it is still valid
http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

 

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/t...ze=medium&y=r&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ask.com%2F

Look at that graph, comparing altavista and ask traffic, they both follow the same trends(dips and peeks). Very interesting.

 

I've heard that Ask.com puts a lot of weight into how their users gauge search results (analyzing clickstreams).

As I understand it, that means they monitor how people treat the pages they visit, how long they stay, if the searcher seems to have found what they're looking for, etc. Then they apply that information to their ranking algorithims, which are probably based on similar factors to the other engines.

Their algo seems pretty solid and hard to trick.

 

Especially for the past 6 months.

 

How do they know how long you visted the site unless you have their toolbar or something?

 

It doesn't unless you have their toolbar, that's why a lot of people don't like Alexa. Personally, I think they should do tracking for the Google toolbar, then it would be a little bit more accurate. Even better, they should all come together and integrate it into every browser.

 

That will never happen. They're all competitors. There's no way they would share user info.

Plus, if too much emphasis is placed on user behavior, SEO would become way too easy. You'd only need to release a few dozen clickbots.

/tom/

 

That is a really fantastic algorithym, I think that Google should use it.

Nevermind, I suck on Ask

 

they need to promote the pay per click model with sponsored coupons or something similar. Large companies will go ahead and put big $$ on the big search engines, but the smaller publishers need to be "inspired" to get onto ask.com's listings. Coupon's usually help.

 

Awesome info here, and a great algorythim if that's how it works.. I spent about an hour searching for info before I thought to ask here..

 

I don't think that's necessarily the case. They could also track your ip to see how long it is before you come back. If I click on SERP #1 and then immediately hit back because it wasn't what I wanted, then they can see I left the site and came back in less than 30 seconds. It stands to reason that might be an irrelevant result if there are enough people coming back that quickly.

On the other hand, if I click a result and never come back, and a lot of others are doing that too, then Ask could assume that it's a result relevant to the search term.

Not saying they wouldn't use toolbar data, just that there are more ways to get similar data.

 

I believe Ask could be a good alternative instead of Google, which long time ago went crazy.

However Jeeve's shadow seems to heavy to defeat and that makes hard find whatever you are looking for, results, SEO, or affiliation

 

ask drives almost no traffic. Don't waste your time with them. I've got hundreds of domains and have seen maybe a half dozen or so searches from them across millions of hits.

 

I do get traffic from ask. Like around 5% of the trafic I get from google on some pages. No idea why though.

 

I have seen that I get hits from Ask that are answers to questions. I get visitors searching for things like:
What are the best beaches in key west?
What is the best widget?
Those searches usually land on pages where I have answered those questions with H tags and titles like <h1>Best Beaches in Key West</h1>

 

The problem with doing SEO for Ask.com is that with their low market share, you barely get any visitors but for the largest keywords. They have a permutation of varies ranking strategist which appears to be more complex than what Google or Yahoo use. Unfortunately, it is also not clear how they include sites in their index.

If anyone has any ideas of how get ranked in Ask.com, that would be appreciated.

 

Amazing

I am surprised some people are in business with their posts so far.

Why put down the traffic any search engine sends you???

I think many need to re-think their positions.. Let's change search engines to something we all are a bit more familar with say roads

Search engines are roads.

Roads in the real world lead to your business.

Roads online lead to your business.

Now each days 100s of people take Google Road to get to your store, These people all look around and then leave without buying.

Everyday 25 people take Yahoo Road to your store, The look around and leave without buying..

Everyday 2 or 3 people take Ask Road to your store and usually 1 of the people buys a product.

Now who amongst you is going to scream "Dont wait on customers who use Ask Road"???

As a side note: Ask.com can embed tracking code in their pages to do analytics just like any other website can... so they do not need a toolbar to measure time on page

 

I read this one on affcommunity.com once, it was a lil story about bars, a great lil post about linking, it was awesome

 

I get a few visitors from ask weekly.....A whole lot less than Google and Yahoo...
I'm not complaining, my single largest order from my online store came from ASK using my #1 keyword.....I'm on the 2nd page...