How To Submit Your Blog URL to Ask.com

It’s often amazing how some bloggers fail to complete basic, yet important, SEO functions after a blog is launched.

Would it be a safe assumption that your blog will receive predominantly most of its organic traffic from Google? Maybe. But, why not maximize your blog’s potential to receive valuable search engine traffic from Yahoo, Bing, and Ask?

Today, let’s introduce you to Ask. Ask is the smallest player of the four search engines named above, but still very relevant.

Who is Ask.com?

Ask is the fourth largest search engine in the United States. From the latest comScore data, Ask makes up 4% of the roughly 14.9 billion internet searches performed domestically.

Before you dismiss Ask.com, let’s put the 4% in perspective. That still equates to 552 million monthly search queries!

Isn’t Google Search all I need?

Google makes up a whopping 2/3 of all search engine queries in the United States, but ignoring the remaining 1/3 is… well… criminal! Your competitor has optimized their blog to attract Bing, Yahoo, and Ask – and so should you.

Let’s take a closer look at Ask. We’ll analyze how Ask works, how proprietary their search algorithm is and how they crawl your blog, shall we?

How Ask Works

Ask’s ExpertRank algorithm provides relevant search results by identifying the most authoritative sites on the Web. Ask search technology is unique from any other search technology because it analyzes the Web as it actually exists — in subject-specific communities.

How does Ask use website crawlers? How do they work?

Ask utilizes website crawlers to collect raw data and gather information that is used in building our ever-expanding search index. Crawling ensures that the information in our results is as up-to-date and relevant as it can possibly be.

• The crawler goes to a Web address (URL) and downloads the HTML page.
• The crawler follows hyperlinks from the page, which are URLs on the same site or on different sites.
• The crawler adds new URLs to its list of URLs to be crawled. It continually repeats this function, discovering new URLs, following links, and downloading them.
• The crawler excludes some URLs if it has downloaded a sufficient number from the Web site or if it appears that the URL might be a duplicate of another URL already downloaded.
• The files of crawled URLs are then built into a search catalog. These URL’s are displayed as part of search results on the site powered by Ask’s search technology when a relevant match is made.

How frequently will the Ask Crawler download pages from my site?

The crawler will download only one page at a time from your site (specifically, from your IP address). After it receives a page, it will pause a certain amount of time before downloading the next page. This delay time may range from 0.1 second to hours. The quicker your site responds to the crawler when it asks for pages, the shorter the delay.

Webmaster Interface with Ask

The first surprising thing about Ask is that they do not provide the type of Webmaster tools we have to come to expect with Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

As a matter of fact, this all you need is to use the format below to submit your site/blog to Ask:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YOUR SITE’s URL.com/sitemap.xml

You will Replace YOUR SITE’s URL with your blog’s URL. Then, place that back in your browser. Hit enter! Voila!

You will see a confirmation from Ask.com that looks like this. Now, repeat this step with all the blogs in the inventory of blogs you manage. (If applicable.)

Were you expecting more? That’s it! (Laughs!) Who said SEO was complicated? (I’m kidding!)

Let me know if you start seeing Ask.com as a referrer in your traffic stats!

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