Wed Jan 23 12:03:12 PST 2019

205

You can think of online communities in the same way as you think of cities and
towns offline. The biggest exception to that analogy is that the online communities
can be based around common ideas, hobbies, or points of interest, in addition to
geographically.
Effect of Links on Teoma
Teoma does most of its link evaluation after the user searches and primarily
focuses on local communities. Several things result from this system:
? It is hard to measure link popularity in Teoma.
? Off-topic links have extremely little effect on Teoma?s search results.
? On-topic links are exceptionally important.

How to do Well in Ask
Ask is usually one of the slower engines at picking up new websites. The average
time for picking up new sites is about a month and a half.
Since the primary focus of Ask is on local communities, it can take a long time to
rank well in it. You will need to find ways to embed yourself in the correct local
communities to list well for competitive terms. Social interaction is key.
Ask has two sections to its search engine results pages. The results section is filled
with the sites that are considered the authority websites. They also provide a
?refine? section. This section lists other terms in the local, associated, term space.
For example, cheese may have phrases like cheddar in the refine section.
Due to their small market share, their slow crawl speed, and their reliance on links
from topical experts, I would not worry about ranking in Ask. I would probably
spend most of my time focusing on the engines with a greater reach.