After a period of redevelopment, Ask.com is making a re-entry to the search engine world. Ask was the home of ‘Jeeves’, otherwise known as askjeeves.com for ten years until Ask.com felt that Jeeves’ job had changed dramatically during that time and was not responding at the right speed. Search requests were becoming more sophisticated and response times needed to shorten. Ask.com decided to focus on improving its search engine technology and now aims to offer a guide through the complex developing world web.

What does this mean for Adsense webmasters and bloggers? You want to appear in the Ask search listings as well as in Google. The way to establish a presence at Ask.com is quite simple. First you need to have up-to-date sitemaps installed. You no longer need a separate Google sitemap as long as your sitemap conforms to the sitemap.org protocols. If you are using WordPress here is a guide to help you install the WordPress sitemap plugin, which takes just a few minutes. Once your sitemap is activated you can submit there are two more simple steps to follow:

1. Insert the ‘auto-discovery’ wording in your robots.txt file:

SITEMAP: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

2. Ping your sitemap location to Ask at this URL:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure you replace ‘yourwebsite.com’ with your website URL!