We have been advised that as of September 30th 2004, Ask Jeeves will be no longer accepting new submissions to the Site Submit Paid Inclusion program.

We understand this strategic decision will allow Ask Jeeves to provide additional focus on building their traffic whilst integrating the various companies’ products that they have acquired recently into their product mix. This potentially includes integrating the Teoma results into the Interactive Search Holdings network. This will make Ask Jeeves the 7th largest American website by terms of unique visitors and should see their market share increase from approximate 3% to around 7%.

Customers who currently have URLs in Ask Jeeves Site Submit managed by ineedhits.com will continue to receive the full benefits of their current subscription until such time as their subscription expires. This includes click thru reporting, regular refreshes and access to customer service.

New customers have a window of opportunity to guarantee their place in the Ask Jeeves index, up until September 30th 2004 and receive a full 12 months subscription with all the benefits provided by Site Submit.

Ineedhits.com CEO Jackie Shervington said “Ineedhits.com is proud to have been associated with the Ask Jeeves Site Submit service for nearly 3 years, including launching the product to the market in February 2002. We are naturally disappointed with the news but will be working hard over the next few months to communicate with all our clients to ensure they can take full advantage of this window of opportunity prior to September 30th.”

Thanks for that, Warren.

I bet a portion of their reasoning is to leave Yahoo! out in the cold as the one major paid inclusion bad guy.

This is the death of the "cover charge" paid inclusion services. It used to be Ask, Inktomi and FAST... and Ask was the only one left standing.

There is good and bad to this news. It's good because now they will be able to compete on the same level with Google in the fact that they will not let money have any influence at all over editorial listings like Yahoo is suspect to.

However it is bad because Teoma which powers Ask is typically slow to crawl new content and add it to their index. I have used the PFI many a time just for the mere fact that after waiting 3-6 months for them to find updated content and add it to their index didn't work, PFI did.

Hopefully they will improve their crawl and update rate.