Does Jeeves send you any traffic?

Really low referrals from Ask........

[skibum]

Out of about 100k SE referrals this month for a site, it got all of 27 from Jeeves. It's a US centric site but even Google Poland, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, and Suisse each sent more traffic than Jeeves.

Scraper sites send more traffic than Ask. Does anyone still get anything significant from Jeeves?

Love the technology and the quality of Teoma but it seems like its going to waste.

[sem4u]

I don't get much traffic from them in the UK, and that is with AdWords running as well.

[abbeyvet]

On one, and one only, of my sites Ask send absolutely loads of traffic. For a time before Google had properly indexed that site their traffic was more than all other sources combined.

Even now it is a very strong second to Google and way more than Yahoo or MSN. I have absolutely no idea at all what makes it love this site so much and no others. But I do not run ads for this site anywhere so the traffic is free and I do not question it to closely :)

This site is not a hugely busy one - last month it had about 15,000 unique visitors, over 3000 of them from Ask.

[abbeyvet]

Hey! I'm a full member :) :)

[RichTC]

Well done Abbeyvet, you must take the Ask Jeeves trophy for being able to secure traffic from them. You must be the only webmaster ive heard of that gets traffic from them!.

Ask Jeeves is about 23 down on our list of refering search engines. In fact we get more hits from some real obscure search engines. Even sites like dogpile send us four times the traffic that Ask do! We have low traffic websites sending us more hits on links than Ask, even small chat forums refer more hits. For us they are a complete waste of time.

Meanwhile the bot is hitting us hard yet indexing very little of what it takes

As ive said in previous posts they should rename it Google Adwords Mark2 because thats what Ask is. Time for Ask to turn its computers off if you ask me - its pointless

[James]

Can you possibly give us your list of your search engines?

This is my biggest problem now. What search engines do we have left that we can actually submit to,apart from paying for inclusion types. I seem to have tunnel vision on Google and MSN now.

[martinibuster]

I have absolutely no idea at all what makes it love this site so much and no others.

This may give you an idea. Find the major queries that are sending traffic via Ask. Then run those queries on Ask. How many ads do you see displayed above the natural serps?

[RichTC]

James,

Hope this helps, cant tell you who some of them are but this gives a good idea. Good Luck

Starting with the usual suspects:-

Google
AOL
Yahoo
Unknown search engines
MSN
Netscape
Overture
Dogpile
Earth Link
Splut
searchy.co.uk
AltaVista
Google (Images)
Seznam
Excite
InfoSpace
Tiscali
AOL (de)
Lycos
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur)
UK Directory
Alexa
Virgilio
ix quick
WebCrawler
Search.com
AllTheWeb
Hotbot
Mamma
Ask Jeeves
Kvasir
Go2Net (Metamoteur)
Atlas.cz
Free.fr
Jubii
Ofir
Centrum.cz
Rambler
Go.com
Yandex

[abbeyvet]

martinibuster, I am not really sure what I am meant to be looking for?

Some of the search terms have ads, a minority don't. As I explained in another post, NONE of them are terms I wanted or aimed to rank for - they are almost all links to an Amazon store, for which I used an off-the-shelf script and which was only intended to act as a way of categorising books relevant to the site in a very different way to that which Amazon does.

I did mod_rewrite the shore links though, but to get out of the categories I manually created would require some work by a user - but not Ask seemingly.

As a result people are buying the odd obscure book and other stuff with no relationship to the topic my site and as a lot of the books they search for are out of print, they click ads too.

That said, I am a bit concerned that the store is going to cause me issues with Google and others and am thinking of banning it in robots.txt. But it is hard to give up the traffic, irrelevant as it is.

Here are this months stats for the site so far:

Google: 4126
Ask Jeeves: 2950
Yahoo: 1506
Ask Jeeves UK: 1369
MSN: 722

The 2 Asks combined are still beating Google!

If I can figue out why it is happening maybe I could bottle it!