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There are many posts on the google forum about optimizing your website but how about some fast input!
I do see that FAST does have some shaky results. Many times do I do a search and see that a page has no mention of the keyword in the body, link, meta tags, or anywhere else on the site. They have a #1 listing for that search term. (probably cloaked) The site has nothing to do with the search term.
I do believe fast has some great traffic to give, just need a little help.
I see quite a few members saying they have trouble making good rankings at Fast. However I apply the same good sense in optimizing pages for Fast as I do when optimizing for ex. Inktomi. I think (some would disagree) that these two engines basically needs the same aproach. At least when you're going for an industry where the competition is not that heavy. The harder the competition the more specific you need to be.
If you do keywords in title, metas, body, alts and links you should probably be fine. Looks like you got the linkpop handled and you sure have a lot of content with all these pages. Fast should take good care of you imo :)
..but you are right, things have been a little unstable over there the last few months. It will probably settle though.
BTW if you dig into some the older posts in this forum, you shuold be able to find a few good nuggets about Fast ;)
I had to cut a phrase with the special copyright symbol.
The copyright symbols acted like a no index word!
After that, no problem as Rumbas said.
It was written:
copyright©company_name
The problem was:
It was possible to find some pages, only searching the URL.
The pages were listes as they had no title (but they had the title!!)
(edited by: heini at 10:27 am (utc) on May 24, 2002)
After that I eliminated everything went fine.
Reading that right it was a problem of code not validating, really. Apparently Fast is more sensitive than other spiders in this regard.
We removed it and like a miracle after the Fast indexing refresh everything went fine.
Now tell me John, does your pages validate?
My site is just about as well positioned on FAST as it is on Google, yet my FAST stats are about one hit to 1000+ in Goo. And, I was number one in FAST for my top KW combo for almost a year, yet it provided nothing. [boo hiss, now I'm number four] I have thought for a very long time that FAST was a formidable challeger to Goo for relevancy of results, and they may very well be, but for my customer (Joe/Jane Internet Surfer 101, maybe 201), FAST just isn't in their world. Perhaps they do better with non-English language searches, I wouldn't know. Frankly, I don't know what their specialty is at the moment.
There was a time, many moons ago, when there were thoughts of even closing down the FAST forum here. It is a strange duck, FAST is. $The days of optimizing for specific search engines are over$.
The "at" symbol quirk is a great sidebar beauty to this thread, so kudos.
>>I have many great listings especially on google. My site carries over 600 pages (1,800) inbound links and more than 7/8 of the pages will have top 10 listings. I enjoy great traffic from google/msn/av and others but not fast.<<
. . . Sounds like you are going to be a great member here!
We have been online for about 6 months and google was the top performer for the most part. We did however manage to publish 100 noncommercial pages in zeal and have enjoyed more traffic on MSN/Looksmart. We are recieving about 2000 visitors per day from those pages vs. the 1000 from google. We do and manage to pull 3/4's of the msn/looksmart traffic to our commercial pages. Hey it's free traffic!
Fast still is ticking me off but the way I see it they can't compare to the traffic I am getting from other sources. I will try to get those listings up, but not that hard. I rather put my time into creating more google optimized pages, and more noncommercial content for msn/looksmart.
