Get Indexed and Ranked in the Ask.com Search Engine

Ask.com is one of the 4 major search engines with the others being the almighty Google, Microsoft’s new Bing, and the venerable Yahoo search engine. Even though Ask.com only has a small percentage of the search engines overall search share, it will be beneficial for your site to be listed and optimized for Ask.

Ask.com is a unique search engine because its primary algorithms centers around answering human readable questions with relevant answers from its search results. This makes Ask search unique in that its goal is NOT to index the entire web like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Ask’s goal is to index only relevant answers to human readable questions using its patented semantic and extraction capabilities. Ask uses this technology to recognize the best answer from a sea of relevant pages.

According to Ask.com’s Technology page, The Ask search algorithm works something like this:

The Ask.com search technology uses semantic and extraction capabilities to recognize the best answer from within a sea of relevant pages. Instead of 10 blue links, Ask delivers the best answer to user’s questions right at the top of the page. By using an established technique pioneered at Ask, our search technology uses click-through behavior to determine a site’s relevance and extract the answer. Unlike presenting text snippets of the destination site, this technology presents the actual answer to a user’s question without requiring an additional click through. Underpinning these advancements are Ask.com’s innovative DADS, DAFS, and AnswerFarm technologies, which break new ground in the areas of semantic search, web extraction and ranking. These technologies index questions and answers from numerous and diversified sources across the web. It then applied its semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance to filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats. In order to extract and rank exciting answers, as opposed to merely ranking web pages, Ask.com continues to develop a unique algorithms and technologies that are based on new signals for evaluating relevancy specifically tuned to questions.

So what this means is Ask.com’s crawler Teoma actually crawls the web putting relevance on finding answers to questions with its patented search, crawling, and ranking technologies. So in light of this revelation from Ask.com, what exactly is the best way to get your site indexed in Ask.com search?

Well you can go about this in two ways.

1. Ping the Ask crawler Teoma

Put the following url in your browser. http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

replace the www.the url of your sitemap here.xml with your url.

Example Ping of the Ask Crawler

If I wanted to ping the Ask Crawler manually I would put the following URL in my web browser:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//raygen.info/sitemap.xml

As you can see from the example, just replace the url to your sitemap in the last part of the URL.

2. Put your link on message forums, blogs, or other sites already indexed by Ask

This is by far the easiest way to get your site listed in the index. If you can get your link posted on a forum topic that has the answer to a specific question that would be even better. I think using option number 2 has a much better chance of getting your web site or blog indexed by Ask much faster then pinging the crawler manually. However once you are indexed by Ask, then manually pinging the Ask crawler is good to ensure they pick up your new stuff.

SEO Optimization Tips for Ask.com Search

Now that we have gotten the getting indexed part down, now you may wonder what is the best strategy to ensure your site ranks decently for the terms you want. Fortunately for us, In the snippet above Ask.com tells us how they rate relevant answers. Ask states that it uses click-through behavior as one of its ranking terms to determine the most relevant answers. These answers are the answers that appear at the top of Ask’s serps. There is more to Ask search engine’s then just click-through however.

The Ask crawler looks to see what communities your url is pointed to, and what communities you link out too. Ask uses this to determines if your site is a hub or an authority. Ask uses the following to determine if your site is a Hub or an authority:

1. If a site has many outbound links to sites that have many inbound links it’s considered a hub.

2. If a site has many inbound links from sites that have many outbound links, then it is considered an authority.

So getting relevant links from sites that have many inbound links will make your site an authority, and linking out to sites that have many inbound links will make your site a hub in the Ask Crawler’s eyes. I think a good mix of both getting linked to and linking out will serve you best.

Also, ensuring you make use of good title tags, include your keywords in your description tag, and use the keywords meta tag. Ask.com “unofficially” supports the keywords meta tag so make use of it just don’t spam.

For even more information about Ask.com and a list of frequently asked questions about Ask.com please visit the Ask.com Webmaster Center.

Good luck with Ask.com

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