Ask Teoma Stopped Crawling

Have you observed it?

[venti]

I realize this is probably specific to our site, however I wanted to see if anyone else has noticed a drop in crawling from ask since about the 16th of July? We are very well indexed in Ask but the bot has all but stopped visiting our site and without any sort of diagnostics from ask I am trying to figure out the cause.

[jdMorgan]

I have noticed that they have dramatically slowed down their crawling on my sites, but they have not stopped.

A second data point, for what it's worth...

Jim

[g1smd]

I still see them here and there.

[venti]

Does anyone know how I could better diagnose why this is occurring (email, ask tool, etc)? It's still going on after two weeks now and I have yet to pinpoint any reason (the only thing we changed around that time was a removal of GA for a test). No robot.txt issues, or weird status codes. Could this be some sort of penalty (has anyone seen one similar)? I would love to fix it, but I am unaware how they would figure out we fixed it if they stopped coming all together.

We still show very well in Ask but the number of pages indexed is steadily declining. Previously, we were getting roughly 200 teoma hits an hour.

I have submitted our site to their sitemap ping tool without success (of helping the situation).

[g1smd]

Mozilla/5.0_(compatible;_Ask_Jeeves/Teoma;__http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml)

Hmm, yes. Now MIA for several weeks on most sites. Not seen anywhere at all for the last week now.

[jdMorgan]

Just today:

65.214.45.117 - - [24/Jul/2008:12:15:14 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 2664 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; +http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml)"

Grabbed four pages. RDNS is crawler4008.ask.com from an IP range leased from MCI.

Jim

[venti]

The last hit from Teoma we saw on our primary site was:
2008-07-15 09:10:06 65.214.45.148 Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Ask+Jeeves/Teoma;++http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml)

Others sites saw it last many days before that.

[venti]

An update, we had 9 hits from teoma over the last 3 hours. 2 for robots.txt and the rest for deep urls.

[Marcia]

Ask 187+51 2.66MB 24 Jul 2008 - 14:54

The site only has about 50-60 pages altogether, and they seem to hit it frequently. (That's for the whole month, last visit on the 24th).

[edited by: Marcia at 10:28 am (utc) on July 25, 2008]

[g1smd]

They came back on July 24th, just a few minutes after I posted my comments above about being missing for a week or two.

[caine]

maybe the ask/teoma crewe have jumped google, and now can do hand edits of websites on demand to users of web dev type forums, becuase they have worked out who is each website.

They wish - i'm seeing very sparodic crawling, certainly slowing down.