SERP Changes in Ask.com

[paladin]

Seeing some significant changes in the SERPs here. Most are positive for my sites which makes me a happy camper.

[venti]

We have seen large jumps from Ask the last two weeks, most significantly this last Friday. About a 40% increase in traffic since Friday. Ask normally makes up about 8% of SE traffic but has jumped up to 12% to 14%. We are #1 and #2 (we have both at the same time) now for hundreds of longer tail queries where before we were #4 and #5 (that I have tested for).

[piatkow]

You get enough traffic from Ask to notice?

[iThink]

Even I'm surprised to learn that people still care for Ask?

[venti]

More then enough to notice (perhaps its our industry), plus the traffic has great "time on site" and very low abandonment rates.

[treeline]

Wow! Hadn't seen Ask in a while. How do you find the SERPs amongst all those ads?

[Angonasec]

Not detected any changes in our Ask traffic, but it is highly valued because the search terms are more focussed, and their users more intelligent.

When there was a bug in Ask a few months ago, I reported it to them directly, and got a personal, helpful, reply from their main Technical bloke.

[paladin]

You get enough traffic from Ask to notice?

Its not a huge amount, but every little bit helps. I do see direct conversions from there and from a number of other smaller traffic sources.

I don't believe in relying just on Google (PPC or SEO) for my traffic or income.

-Alon

[piatkow]

I'd love to have an even spread of referring search engines but for me Google accounts for over 80% and the rest is split between MSN and Yahoo. I haven't seen a single hit from Ask in the last few weeks and I stopped bothering to check my (good) position on Ask about a year ago.

I rechecked two key search phrases when I last posted and still look good for those.

[potentialgeek]

Ask.com is good to have when Google hits your site with a 950 Penalty.

Ask, though, is going to abandon its current SE and, according to a recent news report, focus on niche engining. The best results for certain sectors. It recently bought dictionary.com.

p/g

[bschmitz]

I just searched ask and the SERPS are still listing a URL which I 301'd months ago. All other SE's appear to have picked up the correct URL except for ASK.

[caine]

bit of a sorry state of affairs with ask. instead of copying G's one killer move - which was quick indexing of new content, they have a stale set of SERPs that have always been relevance-questionable.

Its not to late, but they need to start tinkering with they SERPs and steal some marketshare - rather than worrying about how much money they can make from G, for displaying ads on there ever decreasing market share. These guys need to keep there eyes open, once they have no share of the search market - where do they expect the advertising revenue to come from ?

[centime]

erm haven't these chaps recently decided to focus on a very specific niche,,,,

Or have they changed their minds

Do they still have international search?

[caine]

> erm haven't these chaps recently decided to focus on a very specific niche,,,,

yes i believe there was a press release about a re-focus. Does not detract from the quality of SERPs and what they were doing in the past causing where they are now. I've been moaning about the quality of teoma's/ask serps for years now at past WebmasterWorld conferences.

> Do they still have international search?

they do operate 7 sites on subdomains for german, french, italian, spanish, japanese, dutch and uk as well as ask.com -> whats actually happening with them - i don't know. Other than the UK, ask's impact in its varying identities over the years have been minimal upon europe, though some of the Continental chaps here may know differently.

[sem4u]

One of my sites still gets quite a bit of traffic from Ask...more than MSN/Live. Visits from Ask have halved in the last week. Has there been another update?