ASK Added To Rank Tracker
Good news for those of us that use Rank Tracker to monitor their search engine placement. They have added ASK to the engines that they track along with AltaVista and Alexa. As ASK gets more relevant, having an easy option to track your placement is a must. If you don’t know how to submit your site to ASK, check out my post ASK XML Sitemap Submission for the inside scoop.
If you haven’t used ASK in a while you should give it a try. I have been relying on ASK more and more for research. Their main search engine is still the Teoma algorithm and even though they changed the name to ExpertRank, it is still one of the best. One thing that I have found about ASK is they give little credence to ad heavy sites. Content is king at ASK and it is a tough nut to crack from an SEO standpoint. They are ahead of the game in many ways and have long embraced social network marketing sites that are relevant.
Rank Tracker is my tool of choice for keeping track of my site’s placement. WebPosition is overkill and I just don’t like Digital Point. It is extremely fast and doesn’t take up a lot of bandwidth or computer power to run.
ASK XML Sitemap Submission
For those of you who don’t know about XML sitemaps for your website please read my XML Sitemap Guide to learn how to create and manage your sitemaps. Google and Yahoo have webmaster tools for you to upload and manage your sitemaps. Live search will have a similar portal pretty soon. If you haven’t heard about it, read my post Live Search New Webmaster Portal in Beta for more info.
That will take care of the top 3 major engines, but what about ASK? I get 10% of my traffic from ASK and it is due to the fact that I ping them with my sitemap whenever I change the site. No they don’t have a webmaster center, but you can submit sitemaps to ASK one of 2 ways:
- Through the robots.txt file – Once you have prepared the sitemap, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt as follows: SITEMAP: http://www.the-URL-of-your-sitemap-here.xml. The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL. Read my post Search Engine Optimization: Robots.txt for more info.
- Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the-URL-of-your-sitemap-here.xml. My article on Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing has a great overview of XML-RPC.
Make sure you follow the sitemap guidelines at sitemap.org when preparing your sitemap.