Banned from Ask.com! o_0

I recently discovered that my website was banned from Ask. I have submitted a reinclusion request through their customer service at http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/customer_service.shtml.

Has anyone else actually tried to get reincluded in Ask's index? If so I could use some advice on expediting this procedure.

 

Why was it banned? I have never heard of someone getting banned from ask.

 

I didn't think that was possible either.

 

I didn't know anyone even used ask, much less submitted their sites to it

 

I must be banned also - I never get traffic from them.

 

I'd forgotten all about Ask -- wow, it's bad, will keep away from there!!!

 

I have an extremely low opinion of Ask since they sent me absolute garbage traffic when I used them briefly as a PPC provider.

 

Last time I checked AdSense or Google on either site, I'm sure Ask was powered by it.

 

We were included in their index for a long time but never saw any traffic. This is why I never noticed when we got b&.

As far as what caused us to get booted, I would guess overoptimization. Some of our backlinks cause me to lie awake at night. Either that or the whim of a human editor someplace who didn't like the look of our site. If you look at a lot of Ask's SERPs you see evidence of some handjobbery. Take a look at http://www.ask.com/web?q=porn&o=0&l=dir&dm=lang&qsrc=11&adt=1 for example. Furniture porn is #1? Vegan porn? WTF? Yeah Google's guilty of the same thing, but at least when you search for porn, porn is what you get.

And yes, Google provides all of Ask's sponsored results, which is good news if you ever get banned from Ask. Ask's paid results seem to have the string http://wzus.ask.com/r? so I guess it's possible to track these. Time to fire up the old Clicktracks and see what's going on.

Haven't heard from Ask since requesting reinclusion. We're still out of the index. I'll update when/if I hear from them.

Hmmm... judging from this result: http://www.ask.com/web?q=ebay+sporting+goods&qsrc=1&o=0&l=dir - Ask could be susceptible to "domain spamming".

 

Who cares?
They send NO traffic, and their SE sucks anyway. I am 2seconds away from banning them from crawling my site. Look at this...


12 different robots* Hits Bandwidth Last visit

AskJeeves 42586+23 167.27 MB

Googlebot 12085+54 441.73 MB

Inktomi Slurp 3259+1062 75.66 MB

MSNBot 322+193 24.75 MB



Heres the top SE traffic senders:

Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
- Google 696
- MSN 549
- Yahoo 218
- Unknown search engines 31
- AOL 16
- Dogpile 11
- Netscape 4
- Hotbot 3
- MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 2
- Search.com 2
- Google (Images) 5
- AltaVista 2
- Earth Link 1
- DMOZ 1
- AllTheWeb 1
- Excite 1
- ix quick 1


GEE, I sure hope ASK.COM doesn't ban my site, what ever will I do if I lose all that traffic, oh wait there is none.

 

Ask made some majorly poor business decisions in my eyes, and thus the lack of ppl using there system now

Send Ask a bandwidth bill Naples lol, see what they say...

 

Yeah... same here. who cares?

ask is rubbish IMO.

I have 122 unique search engines in my logs, and ASK is not even in that list. here's a sample

1.  	Yahoo  	6,193  	
2. 	MSN 	3,184 	
3. 	Google 	3,400 	
4. 	Google UK 	598 	
5. 	Yahoo UK 	680 	
6. 	Google CA 	324 	
7. 	Yahoo CA 	193 	
8. 	Google AU 	303 	
9. 	MSN UK 	167 	
10. 	Yahoo SG 	88 	
11. 	Google NL 	86 	
12. 	Google DE 	76 	
13. 	Altavista 	56 	
14. 	MSN IN       23 	
15. 	Google BE 	49 	
16. 	Google TR 	52 	
17. 	MSN: xtramsn 	30 	
18. 	Yahoo AU 	123 	
19. 	MSN: ninemsn 	45 	
20. 	MSN MY 	28 	
21. 	Yahoo TW 	21 	
22. 	My Way         32 	
23. 	MSN SG 	 36 	
24. 	AOL UK 	51 	
25. 	AlltheWeb 	23 	
26. 	Google PL 	27 	
27. 	Google IE	19 	
28. 	MSN BE 	14 	
29. 	Yahoo IT 	15 	
30. 	Google BR 	32 	
31. 	Google IT 	19 	
32. 	MSN NL 	7 	
33. 	Yahoo IN 	23 	
34. 	Google AR 	6 	
35. 	Google SG 	20 	
36. 	Google FR 	43 	
37. 	Google PT 	17 	
38. 	Lycos 	16 	
39. 	MSN SE 	11 	
40. 	AOL 	6 	
41. 	Google AE 	11 	
42. 	Google IL 	15 	
43. 	MSN FI 	3 	
44. 	MSN IT 	9 	
45. 	Mamma 	7 	
46. 	Search.com 	11 	
47. 	Yahoo FR 	13 	
48. 	BellSouth 	40 	
49. 	MSN DK 	4 	
50. 	MSN JP 	9 	9 	3 	
51. 	TELUS: myTELUS 	3 	
52. 	Walla IL 	17 	
53. 	Yahoo ES 	9 	
54. 	Yahoo MX 	9  	
55. 	Earthlink 	8 
56. 	Google CH 	8 	
57. 	Google FI 	8  	
58. 	Google NZ 	7 	 	
59. 	My Search 	7 
60. 	Tiscali UK 	7 	

Code (markup):

 

Holy cow, I have never seen so many different search engines in a stats log. I used to have a URL Rediret site that got tons of worldwide SE traffic, but not like that. Cool...

 

lol not one

that sucks balls

 

Ask has spammy results......on some searches the screen is filled with sponsored results...you have to scroll way down to see the "web results"

I just realized I was banned too...I was listed one time..now i'm not...but who cares

 

I can accept the fact that Ask sucks. They even got rid of Jeeves, which pisses me off because I think P.G. Wodehouse deserves more respect than that. What is alarming to me is that some search engine, no matter how insignificant, decided that my site was a turd. Clearly I must be doing something that throws up a red flag.

Looking at Ask's top ten results for my most competitive keyword, I see:

-1 page with high keyword density but short content, max kw repetition = 25x.
-Sites with authority backlinks relevant to this topic niche.
-The business sites have either not undergone serious optimization, or they have gone about it all wrong. 500 links seems to be the cap for sites like these. One industry site has as much as 7,000 backlinks, but it dates from 95(!).
-Age is a VERY STRONG factor. A cheesy site from 97 (400 or so backlinks) is the main e-biz contender in this niche. Industry site from 1996 is #1 in Ask.
-What else is in the serp? 5 non-business industry sites.
-One fugly competitor from 2000, keyword repetition <25 in 516 words of content. I happen to know this guy has a bazillion mirror sites and has about 500 or so backlinks, most of these PR0 links pages. I know he's got a few citations from authorities, but honestly, this is the only one I can't otherwise explain/rationalize. It's like Ask is ranking my lamest, most unsophisticated competitors.
-DMOZ backlinks seem to be a factor in Ask.
-Some of these authority backlinks do not deserve their authority status. In other words, they could probably fool a naive human but there is no earthly reason why an algorithm would assign any value to these sites. This begs the question: exactly how does Ask assign "authority" to a domain? I'm thinking that human input is a factor, probably a warehouse full of guys in China or someplace. Hey, it's been done before - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

Conclusion: it looks to me like Ask is behaving a bit like Google (rank based on age and trust) with a few key differences (overzealous overoptimization detection, overweighted trust value from "authoritative" or older links, Teomaesque behavior mingled with the creepy human factor, possibly dampening/flagging sites with more than x amount of backlinks?). I'm thinking I need to clean up our act or Ask won't be the only search engine that kicks me out. Unfortunately we can't lose any links because we'll drop in Google, so I'm going to tone down our on-page stuff.

Since Teoma's algorithm is focused on IDing clusters of related sites, I may want to try getting extra-relevant, quality citations instead of links from weak "keyword.keyword-keyword.info/keyword-resources" made-for-SEO pages. The most aggressively SEO'd sites in my neighborhood probably share the same garbagey backlinks, and I bet I'm leaving suspicious footprints all over the place. Time to have a chat with upper mgmt.

Ok enough of me wanking about Ask. Thoughts?

 

His logs have broken google & yahoo into geographical locations though.. Besides mamma & tiscali they seem pretty stock standard

 

I also never heard about getting banned in ASK .... are you getting alot traffic form ASK ....that you want get in again ? I get 1-2 per month

 

Are you certain that you've actually been banned? Is it possible that you've simply been de-indexed? If your site is not in Ask's index, that does not necessarily mean you've been banned.

I had a very clean site for a non-profit organization that for some reason dropped out of the index. I wrote customer service. Their reply was "your site is in fact in our index". I checked again, and it was not only back in the index, but back to it's #2 spot.

Now, another of my sites, also very clean, has disappeared. I wrote customer service and have had no reply other than to say the message was received. It seems to me, they've got some indexing issues.

/tom/

 

My site is over a year old, ranks extremely well in all the SEs, is listed in DMOZ and has 1000's of backlinks, yet it's never been listed in ASK.

On the plus side ASK sends me as much traffic as it does Naples with wasting any bandwidth