Traffic Flow SEO

Ask.com has partnered with NASCAR and Hall of Fame of Racing to become the official search engine for the sport.

"As part of our strategy to go deeper into the highest-volume categories and provide the best answer, the first time, every time, we want to be the first place fans search online for NASCAR information," said Ask.com Chief Executive Officer Jim Safka.

My only question is why? There are millions on verticals that probably could drive more traffic (serious traffic) to the engine. Is it because of the NASCAR brand? What does that buy you, a little interesting press coverage?

I think Ask is an incredible search engine that is vastly overlooked by the masses for many reasons, but it is hard to keep up and try to figure out their marketing strategy as it is always all over the place and many times makes no sense at all.

I wish Ask would just wake up and:
- Provide more unique opportunities for advertisers
- Updated their PPC platform (come on let the LookSmart platform go already)
- Open up to the SEO community (indirectly that would go a long way to ultimately increasing legitimacy and winning over more search traffic)
- Provide more tools and insights (like Google Insights for Search or Microsoft adCenter Labs)
- Add unique information to search results (like Ask 3D used to - links, video, images, music)

While I do not really think that the NASCAR partnership is going to hurt Ask, it just seems like such a small win that it will probably not have a large impact on the overall search traffic and awareness - just my 2 cents, but I would have invested those bucks somewhere else. Good luck, Ask.

Link to official press release - Ask.com Enters NASCAR With Multi-Faceted Partnerships