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07/08: Getting A Site Listed In Ask.com

In an entirely unscientific experiment today, I took a look around at Ask.com to see how I stacked up in their search results. It was certainly an interesting little adventure and the results were a little surprising too. I often see people asking how to get ranked in Ask.com without paying for sponsored listings (of which Ask.com returns many) so here's the tale from the perspective of an SEO fumbler.

Let's start off by saying that you cannot submit a site to Ask.com for a free listing, they don't work that way. Your best chance of getting included in their results is via links from other sites, but more of that later. In my little experiment, I picked a search term for which Google has sent me a fair amount of visitors. I chose it because it isn't a term for which a huge number of searches are likely to occur, and because by its very nature, most of the searchers are likely to be dyed in the wool 'Googlers'. I wanted to see just what results I could achieve in Ask.com, for a term I do reasonably well with on Google......

So, the term picked out was "Google Cash Detective". As you can see below, I come in at positions 7 and 8 on page one of Google, which is a slight drop since a few weeks ago, but good enough. My blog has contained a couple of articles about Google Cash Detective since June, and Google returns about 809,000 results for the term entered without parentheses. 

Having established that I'm still ranking on page one, it's time to head over to Ask.com and see just how we stack up there. I've had no visitors from Ask.com in a long time for anything at all, so I'm not expecting to find much in the way of results, if any.

If you haven't been to Ask for a long time, like me, you will straight away notice their new design, now looking much more Web 2.0, for want of a better term. It's actually a quite attractive interface, but we're more interested in what's under the hood. Upon typing in my search and hitting enter, a few things jump out at me straight off. Firstly, a lot of sponsored results, in fact out of 18 listings, the top 3 and the bottom 5 are all PPC ads. (As an interesting aside the third ad down is an official page advising that GCD is sold out, which suggests that more releases beyond the initial 1000 are certainly in the pipeline).

The sponsored results are otherwise exclusively from people pushing alternatives to GCD, using rather lame and tired ad copy. So, no real help for people seeking information on GCD in the sponsored listings, unless they want to buy a rival product. Let's see how things are looking in the organic results. Everything on page 1 relates either to ads or information published prior to the initial release of the script back at the beginning of June, so, although relevant, they are not really up to date. The second page replicates the paid advertising and there are a couple more sales type pages, one relating to the second release and how people could get hold of it, the other leading to a spammy and completely unrelated junk e-book type sales letter, piggy backing off the keyphrase.

And that, is about all you get. Before you reach the bottom of page 2, results are being returned for completely unrelated sites like "Welcome to The Police State"!! Well, no appearance for my site at all so far, and this continues until I gave up around page 10. In fact, the most relevant and useful link is to be found on page 3 and links to the Work Boxers blog, which I know has been conducting similar conversation threads to my own about all the issues surrounding GCD. All in all, it's a very poor showing, without even any results for the GCD forums.

But, undeterred, I decide to dig deeper. I may not exist on the web according to Ask, but I notice they do have a separate 'blog' search section, so let's check it out; after all, my Google results are from a blog, maybe that's where I'm going wrong.

Well, wouldn't you know it, there I sit, top of the pile! The results for this search are certainly more relevant and I don't say that because of my pleasing result. If you look more closely you will see that my listing is actually courtesy of Technorati, and not a direct hit from my domain. 

In fact, having already done a search, I know my site does not exist in their index yet. This proves that getting a good listing at Ask.com will certainly require you to have links from sites that they do include. Most bloggers will ping services like Technorati as a matter of course, but it reiterates how much negative effect not promoting your blog to these services might have. Moving through the results I get more hits through services like Reddit and ClipClip (sorely underrated social bookmarking site) and there are several results from Simpy and social networking/blogging sites like the excellent Bumpzee. It bears witness to the fact that social bookmarking is definitely an important part of a blogger's strategy.

There is also a tab for searching RSS Feeds at Ask, so, I decide to see where that one will lead. In a word, nowhere, no results found at all. This strikes me as a little odd, because blogs have feeds, and there were definitely a couple of direct links to blogs in the previous search. Perhaps it's a duplication avoidance thing? I don't really know. It did however lead me to make one more enquiry of Ask.com - my site does not appear in their listings, but does my feed?

A quick search for "Cayman" shows my main site's feed in number 6 position, courtesy of Feedburner and this blog's feed on top of the second page of results. So, my feeds are there but a search for some of my recent post titles turns up nothing at all, suggesting no deep indexing of feeds, just the main RSS address.

After all this, did I really learn anything? I think it's pretty clear that there is a good reason why Google is THE search engine of choice. Love them or hate them you have to say that they do an amazing job of returning relevant results, at least on the evidence of this admittedly very limited testing.

What does it say about Ask.com? Well, I don't  for one minute think that all search engines should return the same results, what would be the point? I think it's great that they carry on with their labours and try to provide an alternative service. However, it is very important that the search results are pertinent and meaningful to the searcher, who just wants the best information quickly and simply. I think Ask falls down a bit here. Also, why single out blogs as separate search results? Google loves blogs, but the other players, not so much, and I have heard people complain about far too many blogs showing up in their search results, so just maybe, Ask are onto something. The trouble is, excluding relevant results from blogs and returning poor information seems hardly rational. If the most relevant results come from bloggers, surely it's better to show them, than a wildly off topic substitute?

A great number of Internet users will never even get near the blog or feed tab on Ask's pages in any case and will leave without finding what they want, probably heading straight to Google. Being different is all well and good, but search engines are judged on results and although my example is probably not representative of Ask.com user demographics, I think my findings are still valid. 

For you, the blogger, it seems the best way to ensure you get found at Ask.com is to use social bookmarking, blogging communities and forums as a gateway into their results. As to whether it will bring any worthwhile traffic is another matter and will depend a great deal on what you blog about. Probably, the smaller your niche, the better chance you will have. On this evidence however, for the pathetic dribble of visitors it brings to my site during the course of a month, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about being indexed or not.

If you've got something to say, please do so. My earlier disclaimer that I'm no SEO expert still stands and some authoritative comment would be welcome, as would anyone else's observations or corrections of glaring errors.

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