I used to worry about ask. Now my sites are indexed, many ranking well....and they bring squat for traffic. Here is a great example, customer's site..
Good competitive phrase "satellite equipment"
3,310,000 results in Google
Sites pageviews from phrase...Averaging 2609 views daily or 23.12% total average daily pageviews 11285
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=satellite+equipment&btnG=Google+SearchSite position #1
Google % of phrase views 9.1 % of total views
http://www.ask.com/web?q=satellite+equipment&search=search&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dirSite position #1
Ask % of phrase views 1.2 % of total views
Seems hardly worth the effort or concern. I have bigger fish to fry, that do provide traffic and conversions. Like the fact that the phrase is stuck on Yahoo at the 11 position. :cry:
Ask is just a low performer, and they do do a poor job of crawling and caching pages. We move and redesigned the site above 10/25, and Ask's cache date is 10/15...Give me a break!
--Melanie