Over two years ago now we did a major overhaul of our client's medical illustration site, netterimages.com. It went from a small brochure-ware site to a full-fledged e-commerce site. At the time we did everything we were supposed to and redirected just about every page and every major image to the page/image that best matched the page on the original site.

I usually ignore Ask since it doesn't give us much of any traffic, but today I took a look at what pages they had indexed for netter and there on page one of the SERPs were two URLs that haven't existed on the site since the redesign 2 years ago. And not only that, but they were one of the featured URLs with previews!

When you search on Google the page doesn't even show as being in their index. A search on Yahoo!, reveals that the URL is in their index, but it's just a URL with no descriptive text, which shows they're aware of the URL, but it's not a page they return when people do queries.

But Ask shows a description for the page (which is the description for the new URL, not the old URL), and they actually return the URLs when people do queries. For example, a search on "muscles of hip and thigh" on Google and Yahoo! show related pages on netterimages in the #1 and #2 position in the SERPs, Live (aka MSN) shows the correct URL in position 1. Meanwhile, the same search on Ask returns the old URL in the #1 position, and a newer URL in the #2 position - but it's the old URL that has the preview and is presented as being authoritative.

But it gets better... They seem to think the new URL is duplicate content and they don't even have it in their index. Instead, what they've done is crawled it and basically pretended the redirect was going the other direction and that everything on the new page belongs to the old URL.

To me, this is just amazing. Or maybe it's not amazing at all and it's just another example of why I think Ask is more about hype and advertising than good search results. With the social bookmarking sites becoming competitive search engines, I don't think Ask will be around for all that much longer... I just don't understand why someone would want to use Ask when there are much better search engines out there...

Tags: ask.com, redirects, SEO/SEM, spiders
Categories: Ask, Spiders/Bots, Web Site Configuration