Forum Moderators: open
The current database is still showing pages that we removed 2 months ago, and none of the new pages have appeared yet that were crawled.
Has anyone been tracking the FAST update cycles? I suppose that it will become much more important if/when Yahoo swaps over.
It just seems strange that there is such a large time span between the crawl and the update - longer than Google even. FAST took the entirety of our new UK directory...so I am just keen to see how much difference this makes.
Marcia, paid pages not updating is not what you paid for. I would contact Lycos, whom you have a deal with...
One thing is for sure, the FAST PFI model as resold and handled by Lycos.com and Lycos.Europe needs some serious reevaluation.
Not even the paid has been updated and it's been well over a week.
Our PFI sites are always updated in 24-48 hours. We have a bulk submission deal with Lucos Europe.
Are we in the quiet period before a massive update? There are people complaining about the PFI pages not being spidered/updated as well. This lends me to believe that either:
a. There is some heavy work going on behind the scenes that will bring a major update to their database.
or
b. FAST is a shambles at the moment and they can't run a scheduled PFI service or update their index properly.
But seriously, the problem with long delays between a crawl and an update is that the content becomes staler every day.
Google suffers from the same problem to some extent - a 3/4 week delay means that many pages are out of date. If FAST's update period is going to be 5 weeks or more, then their content is never going to be as fresh as Google's.
You can rest assured that Fast's update time isn't a patch on yours :)
I know that you probably don't want the competition, but I really want Fast to be a decent competitor to keep Google on its toes. As you may have read elsewhere, I do hope that they got the Yahoo deal. You don't need it any more, given your total domination of the search engine industry ;)
Google has updated twice now while we have been waiting for Fast to update. :(
<added>BOL, looking for this [webmasterworld.com]? </added>
hmmm Im number 1 for a single keyword with ATW now....
congratulations BOL, that would not be hard to guess given your profile.
Any idea what made it happen?
I would be interested in what type of traffic such a one word No1 ranking gives within ATW, if you would be willing to share..
The only thing I have changed is use a little more CSS and some absolute DIV's, relatively same old cwap design........just sometimes re-arranged what order the content falls in.
I don't think the ATW number 1 will amount to much, but I get not bad traffic from Lycos.....so I'll check it out and try to measure what sort of traffic comes from it.......and post here
I'd be willing to share because I have nothing to lose ;)
Richard
Not sure what is going on then....seems like little algo tweaks before/after an update...im at a loss :)
Yes, they are in Yahoo, ODP, and a lot of other serious portals, including a number of academic ones (they are not overtly commercial). No, they are not banned or penalized in any way (nor should they be). Yet they don't appear. Much more flimsy efforts, from my old stock, are in there.
I've been waiting about 6-8 months and have all but given up. I find FAST very slow to index at the best of times. I live with it because I won't pay. Bt the missing site syndrome is a strange one.
Fast - as we have discussed in several threads - apparently does not update a complete db in one go but in portions.
Here's my preliminary explanation of Fast update behaviour from one of those threads [webmasterworld.com]:
It's clear that the db is devided in several segments of freshness.Freshest is of course the segment with the sites crawled for the news search - those are crawled permanently.
Next is the db segment with the PFI pages - refreshed each 24-48 hours.
After those comes a chunk which supposedly gets updated each 7-10 days. This is what Fast refers to as popular content.
What's in this segment? How do you get in there? CTR? If so from ATW - or Lycos? Fresh content on the sites? Linkpop?Finally - and that's where the lights get dimmer and the moaning gets louder - comes a base of urls which sometimes it takes months to get updated.
Napoleon, that's strange. I've not yet come across well linked sites, listed in ODP, that didn't make it into Fast sooner or later.
Any idea what might hinder Fast from indexing your sites?
GG - how about your sites - you too encounter problems with Fast?
It is now something like 70 days since the full crawl and still no update for us.
What I don't understand is that Fast HAS crawled the site and HAS updated, probably a couple of times, since then, but it simply hasn't used any of the crawl information for our site.
