Have you noticed how infrequently and deeply Ask appears to be indexing websites? I reviewed a number of my client’s websites and discovered that of the big 4 robots (Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK) Ask is dramatically falling behind. Where the other search engines are indexing daily or at least every couple of days Ask has, in some cases, not indexed at all!

To be certain that I used fair judging principles I chose to review the robot stats for a few of my largest client’s websites. These are sites that have a wide variety of top 5 and number 1 positions across the search engines and have a great number of search engine friendly pages to index. In these cases the other 3 search engines have been indexing the site often in view of their authoritative content; but not Ask.

So far Ask has been focused on expanding their Smart Answers service. I congratulate ASK on creating new and interesting tools but I think they should first focus on the more important issues like fresh content. I am sure that other, larger sites are experiencing more spidering than my assortment of clients but quite simply that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the other search engines are keeping up with their responsibilities for providing frequent and complete spidering but Ask appears to be far behind.

How are your indexing patterns for Ask? I would be very interested in your feedback. Please post a comment or email me.

Please Note: The following chart is a representation of the Robot indexing results for a large and authoritative website. I had to cut this chart short because it was extremely long and I edited it to protect the privacy of my client. This chart was created using ClickTracks Professional, if you are interested in web analytic services go to Stats.StepForth.com.


The Ask Search Engine Robot – Is it Depressed?