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A client recently asked me if they needed to have a robots.txt added to their site for Ask.com to index them.  Here’s what you need to know about this.

Your site should include a robots.txt which will give directives to  search engines about the way you want them to handle all sorts of things.  However, technically you do not need  it to get ask.com to index your site  as it is one of  two mehtods for a accomplishing this.  If you don’t know how to do a robots.txt you can still get  ask.com to index your site by letting it know you have  an xml  site map on your site.  If you don’t have one of these go get a free one built at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and upload it to your root directory or some other appropriate directory.

Once you have  your xml site map you need to let ask.com know that you have  it.  To do this you will enter http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yoururl.com/sitemap.xml (replacing everything after the double forward slashes that trail %3A with your actual url and sitemap location) into the address bar of your browser and hit return.  If everything works as it should you’ll get an ask.com page that looks like the image above, saying you’ve been successful.

My hope is that the above is a little more useful to those of you who are complete non technical types than the language ask.com uses, but if you want it straight from the horses mouth click Does Ask.com support sitemaps?