I can't remember the last time I said anything negative about Ask Jeeves. But honestly, they haven't been tested much on the Webmaster relations front. So I found a perfect opportunity to test them. Viggen, a well known forum member at many forums, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld forums named Previous Domain Owner Penalty. He basically said that he bought a domain name in 2003 that has a previous penalty, Google told him that. In time, Google and Yahoo released the domain from its penalty, but Ask Jeeves did not. So I told the folks I know at Ask Jeeves to reply to the thread. Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves replied with the following message;
Hello: You can contact us via this page: http://webk.ask.com/contactusPlease choose the "Help with getting your site listed" option and please enter comments on why we should review it.
thanks, Kaushal Kurapati Senior Product Manager for Search, Ask Jeeves, Inc.
Great. Now I sit back and track to see how Ask handles this. What is disturbing is that at all the conferences Ask Jeeves says they take all responses seriously and they reply to them by individuals quickly. Why do they do that? Because they don't get the volume of requests that Google or Yahoo gets and they were proud to say they are better at communication than G or Y.
But two weeks later and Viggen has yet to see a response from Ask Jeeves on the topic.
Makes me wonder if Ask Jeeves does take feedback requests seriously?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: Kaushal Kurapati emailed me and has now taken care of the issue.