How To Submit Your Blog URL to Ask.com

It never fails to amaze Source Blogger, that even after one's blog has been in operation for many months, that simple SEO tasks were not completed upon the blog's launch.

Depending on your blog's content, are you able to predict your percentage of search-based inorganic traffic? Of course not. Perhaps, you can assume that a greater majority of your traffic will be derived from Google searches, but would it hurt you to have a consistent level of quality traffic from Yahoo, Bing, and Ask?

Who is Ask?

Ask is the fourth largest search engine in the United States. From the last comScore data collected in October, Ask makes up 4% of the roughly 14.3 billion internet searches performed domestically.

From this chart, we see that Ask is a lesser player in comparison to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But, nearly 4% of the domestic internet searches still equates to over 552 million search queries!

You should want a portion of that search traffic for your blog.

"Source Blogger, isn't submitting my site to Google...enough?"

It's enough if you want to ignore a 1/3 of the remaining search traffic. Do you want to do that? I don't believe you can afford to, can you? Your competition may already be enjoying a nice amount of search-based traffic from Bing, Yahoo, and Ask...and they're accomplishing this because you don't capitalize on the opportunity to get listed yourself.

Get Listed!

In previous articles of Source Blogger, we have demonstrated both the importance and the ease of your blog's inclusion to the major search engines.

What may be surprising to you is the simplicity, ease, and minimal amount of time it will take to complete this task.

Let's get you listed, shall we?

Google

Bing

Yahoo

Would you like to your blog to be included in a search engine 3x the size of Google? Of course, you do!

Try this on for size: Baidu Baidu is the primary search engine for China.

What is organic traffic? And tell me why I should even care!

Organic traffic is defined as the generation of free web traffic sent to your website/blog from targeted keywords when searching for content on the World Wide Web when using a search engine. Remember this traffic is unpaid and keyword based.

As a matter of fact, we're going to hit you with a rather harsh reality. You blog will never truly be successful unless you take into account the significance of search engine optimization.

If you've been following Source Blogger for any length of time, rarely does a article publish without some mention of blog promotion and marketing. But, it is NOT ENOUGH. And if you think it is, you are fooling yourself.

Your blog cannot survive on traffic exchanges, link exchanges, and blogging communities alone. And I am directing this statement to those with real expectations to make an impact in the blogoshere and become "leaders of industry" in their niche/caterory of expertise.

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, 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

Replace YOUR SITE's URL with your blog's url. Then, place that in your browser. Hit enter!

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.)

Ok, you can leave now. That's it! (Laughs!)

Look, no one said blogging had to be complicated all the time, does it? That's why you love Source Blogger. No one makes it as easy we do to make you a more successful blogger.

Still unsure about receiving Source Blogger by email or RSS? Go ahead and look at some of our older articles. There is more resourceful, relevant content there than you will find on any other site - and it's all written with you in mind. You are the demanding, no-nonsense reader that we envisioned would be a great fit for the Source Blogger Community when we started! There are over a hundred articles just like this. No mind-numbing babble either. Only real, step-by-step tutorials and instruction. Make today the day you decide to become part of the growing, Source Blogger Community. If Source Blogger is not the best blog in the world on providing you the most relevant blogging tools and resources for your success, in a format that is easy to understand and inspires you, please cancel immediately. No questions asked.

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