Ask.com and you shall receive..

Last night I was sat at home, relaxing not on my computer but watching TV with some friends and I happened to see a new Ask.com advert. Now I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before and just not paid attention to it, but last night I actually took it in. The advert was simply to promote the new design and usability at Ask.com. The advert showed an example of a simple search for London and what features you can utilize using ask.com

So I logged in to Ask.com this morning and did exactly as the advert indicated, I typed “London” in the search bar and immediately a Search Suggestions box drops down with relevant queries, top three being London, London underground map and London Map, all pretty relevant but I continued with just selecting London.

Once the three column results page was displayed my first impressions were nothing but admiration for what they had achieved. For so long have we been stuck in the world of 2 column search engines, the big G being the main cause for this as people get “familiar” with such layouts. Before you get scared it’s a very good design and it’s very web 2.0, with large fonts, clear headings, Maps, Current weather, images, Blogs and videos all being displayed on one page!

My goal was to find out some information on the London eye as I have never personally been on it. I used one of the related suggestions displayed on the left side column and was directed to a page full of useful information, photos and Blogs about the London Eye.

One really nice feature was that under the most relevant website (yes the first website really was the best) was a “More Tourist Attractions” drop down menu, which had all the other well known tourist hotspots for the city, again very easy to use.

So I thought to myself that ask have obviously used the best example on their TV advert so obviously the information about London would be of good quality. So I decided to search for “SEO”.

The results were quite different for a non geological search term. For a start only two columns were displayed so there were no images or videos or even Blogs listed on the page, my initial thoughts weren’t positive. However, I was about to discover something quite special, instead of expecting to have all the information in front of me without pressing the mouse more than twice I changed my ways. I clicked the “Blogs” tab on the left column and searched “SEO”.

I was immediately drawn over to the now “third” column which had appeared and listed were the “Top Feeds” which listed Seomoz, Seo Book, Matt Cutts, Seo BlackHat and Seo by the sea. To be honest the top three Blogs listed are in my opinion the three most useful bogs on the web in regards to seo, so top marks for this Ask.com. Something else caught my eye, under the main search results were two buttons, one named “Subscribe” and the other named “Post To”. If you click on the subscribe button a list a various feed readers are displayed which you can subscribe to very quickly, a nice feature if you’re in a hurry. Also the Post to button has incorporated the social media aspect of the web and you can bookmark directly using this button to such sites as Digg and Reddit.

In conclusion Ask.com has really impressed me in terms of usability and content and after using it for only around ten minutes, reverting back to Google, it just doesn’t feel the same. I suggest everyone have a look around the new site and let me know what you think?

Reading on the Digital Point forums Matt Cutts recently posted:

“As far as the tool bar Page Rank, I definitely wouldn’t expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.”


The Page Rank update is still very much on the lips of webmasters worldwide. Hang on in there guys, it will happen in all good time.

For those of you that don’t know what Stumbleupon is all about, it’s a website where you can find new and interesting sites, rated and reviewed by web users. Signing up to Stumbleupon is a painless process which involved a short registration form and downloading a tool bar for you chosen explorer, don’t worry it’s trustworthy and doesn’t take up too much room.

Once downloaded and registered you have a profile on Stumbleupon and every time you click on the icon for a “Good Website” the page will automatically be saved on your page. You do also have the option to review a website, I personally feel it’s nice to give some kind of feedback to the webmaster, be it good or bad.


So why is Stumbleupon an untapped goldmine?

Just over a week ago I read an interesting article about social media websites, located on www.seomoz.org and they believed that good amounts of traffic could be generated, and that the traffic would be of a high quality. At first I must confess I was a little skeptical, due to the fact when using social media sites in the past the bounce rates (amount of users leaving the site immediately) would tend to be quite high.

So how do you get this high quality traffic?

There are different techniques to get the hits, the method I used was on a website well known to webmasters – Digital Point. On the forum there is a section where you can offer stumble exchanges, this is a process whereby you list your website and ask people to stumble it and in return you will stumble theirs.

In total I must have stumbled around 25 to 30 different websites for people and the same was done for one of my websites. I left it for the rest of the day and didn’t think much else about it. To my surprise the results were amazing, just look at the screen capture below:

Now the website I tested would on average receive around 20 unique visitors a day, this is mainly because no advertising has been initiated. As you can see over one evening and one night the website received 427 unique visits. Not only that but 754 page views and a bounce rate of 33%, this means the traffic generated actually looked around the website.

Now I spent roughly 1 hour stumbling websites, at the very most and this generated good quality traffic at no cost. I suggest you all do the same and take advantage of this and get something for free!

By the way feel free to stumble this page if you have signed up – thank you!

The BIGLIST of SEM and SEO Blogs has been released and is a very good resource at looking for specific SEO related blogs. The list has been compiled from 400 websites that provide comprehensive information regarding SEO and SEM.

Although our SEO Unique blog did not make the list it is hardly surprising as we have only been live for a few months.

With our readers support we hope our information will one day make the list.

If you are internet savvy and involved in the world of SEO then you will have more often than not heard about DMOZ before. DMOZ was created in January of 1999 as an Open Directory, a place where a selection of good quality websites could be stored to be used as reference.

A unique point of DMOZ was that the directory was human edited which means no spamming websites or cheating the “system” for financial gain. DMOZ became so popular that major search engines, including some big names (like AOL) use to – and still do use the websites stored as reference for their search results.


Personally I have been creating websites for around 10 years but made the mistake of not perusing them as they would probably be worth a lot of money these days. Back then things were a lot simpler, with html coding being the primary source of website design. Anyway, back on subject – getting listed on DMOZ use to be a pleasant experience which took no more than 2 minutes of your time and you could expect to see your website listed within a few months (yes even back then it still took a while).

Back then as soon as I was listed in DMOZ I saw a massive increase in traffic results, not just random traffic but targeted, and I had a sales increase of at least $3000 per month, from my then bedroom. I had a huge increase from Google and many smaller search engines that used DMOZ.

So where did it all go wrong? DMOZ in itself has become something it probably set out to get away from - it’s a website that is now controlled by the human editors that abuse their own positions for financial gain thus allowing non important websites the chance of a possible boost. I’m not saying every editor is taking a bit of extra cash for the job but it is near enough impossible to get listed on the directory. I have personally submitted around 5 or 6 different websites, following all the guidelines, that was around 2 years ago and still nothing. I even contacted an editor and asked what the deal was. He told me that my websites were either not visible or there are no editors in my selected categories.

Well obviously times change and so do seo methods of getting more traffic. So over the past few years I’ve been looking at how important being listed in DMOZ is. On my journey for answers I realised that it is not as half as important as it once was, Google’s algorithm now looks at many different factors such as links, content and updates (plus 101 different variables). If you get listed in DMOZ you won’t see the dramatic increase in SERP positions you may have once though you would get. There are plenty of other good quality directories out there that provide good links for a small price.

You can see in the image below that DMOZ are taking a hit in 2007 as more and more people are just fed up with the level of service they provide.

Conclusion – don’t waste your time with DMOZ and definitely don’t pay an editor for inclusion, this will only lead to disappointment. By all means submit your website but don’t sit there waiting for your website to get listed. Is there still time to save DMOZ – doubtful.