My poor Fast rankings

pay for inclusion needed to rank?

[needsomehelp]

With the Yahoo and FAST talks I decided to check my rankings in FAST. I rank well for all my sites in Google, top 5 for many terms, but gave up looking for my most important terms in FAST after 1500!!
I practice no shady techniques that would cause a ban, is there even a ban inflicted by FAST?

My sites come back in results when I search for the url so I know they are in the database. Do I have to pay for inclusion to be ranked in results?

Am I alone on this? Help is appreciated.

[heini]

>Do I have to pay...?
No. On the contrary, paying won't help in ranking. Paying sure gives you the chance to get your page refreshed on nearly daily basis, so that tweaking is made easier.

But to rank you have to get the basics right.

Ususally - and I mean usually, not always - a site does well with Google and with Yahoo should rank good in FAST too.

Is your site freshly indexed - in that case give it some time.

How many pages are in the index - is it only one, then try to get more in.

Do you have used tactics, which may have caused a spam flag raised?

[martinibuster]

Is there a free way into FAST? One of my clients is in there (Opera Singer), but not mine. I submitted using the free submit option, but no luck. I reckon that I'll have to pay.

But only when they become important enough. Otherwise, keep dreaming Fast.

[heini]

>Is there a free way

I never paid.
Just as with Google good links are the key.

[needsomehelp]

Don't think I've used shady tactics besides doorways (over a year ago) on oldest site in question. I see so much spam in Lycos, cloaking doorways, I don't think I've raised red flags. I would think that my flags would have been raised in Google if anything, and they were not.

Other sites are sort of new, couple of months, all pages listed but not ranking at all....

My industries are competetive, so I am really at a loss as to why I do so well at Google and off the radar on Lycos.

Is there a way to find out if banning has been imposed?

[toolman]

>>>Google good links are the key.

Are you saying Fast uses link pop or anchor text?

[needsomehelp]

About links, got many of them on all sites and 5-6 page ranks on google.

[quiet_man]

Just did some testing on FAST and found that for 4 of my sites launched since last autumn, only the index pages have been indexed (via free submit). These same sites rank top 5 in Google for main KWs, and two have Yahoo! listings. All are in DMOZ and have good inbound links.
Further testing of some older sites shows that the only pages re-indexed by FAST in past 6 months are those that were listed last year. All new pages added to those old sites have been ignored.
Conclusion - FAST is only indexing one page per site for any new site submitted for free or found through links. This is in line with its PFI, which is on a per-page basis.

[JFord]

I too rank well in G, for a certain kw, but unless I do an exact phrase search in FAST I don't show up at all with the exception of an obscure news release on another site. One of my other pages (for the same site) ranks well, I have only used the free submit, no PFI, should I PFI the page that isn't showing up? This is our most important and searched for product. Please help. Thanks sincerely.

[quiet_man]

JFord: you can check exactly how many pages of your site are indexed in FAST by typing "url.all:www.yoursite.com" into the search box (without the commas). My experience is that any site submitted for free in the past 6 months will only have its index.html page listed. I've never used PFI so can't answer your question, except that it looks like you won't get any more pages listed via free submit.

[JFord]

Thanks quietman. Anyone else have any ideas on the PFI question? I really need to get this figured out. Any and all assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[heini]

>it looks like you won't get any more pages listed via free submit.

Not at all. FAST has been adding pages to the index like mad lately. DB size got doubled in only a few months, now over the 2 Bill. mark. And those are pages really indexed. not just known to be existent from links.

Personally I've seen several sites making it to the index in full, with each and all inner pages. None were paid.

[Dpeper]

I dont know peps all this talk about fast inspired me to go take a look if they had indexed me, 29 pages indexed, My sites only like 35 pages big. I never paid sites only been on the web a few months.

-Donny

[martinibuster]

Correction, my web design business IS in FAST. But only for 1 page.

For those of you who say they have more than one page, is it a commercial listing or personal/informational/community type pages?

I checked for a client's page and her entire site was in there. She's an opera singer. However, she ranks number 2 for her own name (beneath a .edu online article about her!). Rotten algo if you ask me...

I queried my business' name and I ranked #29, after 28 laughable and completely irrelevant results. That's a bottom of the barrel algo/database.

I've at least a hundred links to me, but FAST is only aware of 12. And four of those are redundant! They counted links twice! Rotten database, if you ask me...

There is no way I will trust my money and my business to a search engine that still has a LOT of catching up to do. NO WAY.

[edited by: martinibuster at 12:21 am (utc) on June 15, 2002]

[heini]

Martinibuster, what command did you use to find the links?
>edu site
and I thought Google gives prference to edu sites...

[martinibuster]

url.links:www.yoursite.com

[heini]

You should use link.all:xyz.com to to get the proper listing. link: is not operative.

Best regards,

- Knut Magne Risvik / FAST

Posted today [webmasterworld.com]

Thought I let the experts speak ;)

[martinibuster]

I stand corrected. FAST has found 56 links to me, most of them OBSCURE dmoz knock-offs.
For example, who is this? nextquest2000.usonline.com

Moreover, the question still stands: Why is it that AV and all the other search engines can answer a simple business name query but FAST/ATW falls on it's face?

[edited by: Marcia at 7:20 am (utc) on June 15, 2002]

[quiet_man]

>Personally I've seen several sites making it to the index in full, with each and all inner pages. None were paid.

Assuming you mean new sites added in the past six months, that offers some hope (also dpeper's msg too - thanks for that).

I wish I knew what I was doing wrong then - like I said, all my sites that rank well in Google only have one page indexed in FAST in past six months.

No point resubmitting if FAST is a crawler anyway; clients can't afford PFI; so I'll just keep hoping then?!

[NeoN]

Ok, and back to PayPerInclusion program..
1) Did any body tried that? Results??
2) I can not understand.. Do they work as INK, per 1 page, or will they re crawl all the site starting from URL every 48 hours? I think, probably like INK

I think, re crawling is the good reason to try this service.. Other thoughts will be appreciated!

Thank you!

[heini]

NeoN - FAST PFI is currently available only via Lycos. Lycos.com, Lycos.de and Lycos.co.uk all offer slightly different packages.

The basic version offered works per url - that is:per page.
You pay for 1 page to be included and refreshed every 24-48 hours for one year.

Lycos.com also offers an extended version, where you pay a flat rate depending on the number of pages and get a site search facility for your site as added value.

> results..
results are your pages get included and refreshed each 24-48 hours. Period. No influence on ranking.

[mat]

Well, I do OK on Fast - could be better, and in general I have to say the results aren't overly impressive.

General impressions ...

Lots of unclustered results - it seems that the algo. can't spot (or isn't bothered by) the sort of aliasing/machine names grouping, eg, example1.tackytactics-r-us.com, example2.tackytactics-r-us.com,
yougettheidea.tackytactics-r-us.com
- one set of SERPS had 4 consecutive pages of this junk, all effectively for the same site, just a mix of deeplinks/sections. Poor, very poor.

Seems to be a need for same sort of PR thingummy - the results are great for the small guys, but, ultimately, it should be the bigger sites that come in first - OK, OK, not in all fields, but, evolution is evolution in the long term. There are sites showing up on my keywords/phrases that I haven't seen anywhere for months, if not years. And rightly so. A victory for democracy say you, a pain for the user say I - these are small-time sites that should be showing up for very specific-locale searches, not on the first page for generic searches.

And how are they showing over 5,000 pages for my site? Pretty much everything is static, there just isn't that much to get into. Google and AV have got it right at around 2,000 pages, and this isn't a case of Fast riding roughshod over robots.txt, it's simply that there are not that many pages. Weird.

Mat

[Axacta]

My site is another one where only the index page shows in the results. Fast has spidered the whole site a number of times, but none of the other pages show in the first couple of hundred results for their keywords. There seem to be lots irrelevant sites in the results.

I agree with martinibuster, I am not impressed with their algo.

[needsomehelp]

Upon some more research...
When I search for kw with no quotes, I am in oblivion, not even in the top 1500.
500,000 results w/0quotes

When I search for same term in quotes I am ranked number 2...
*note it is a competetive term with 45,000 results with term in quotes

Any sense to this?

[martinibuster]

When I search with quotes, or with the "exact quotes" thingy enabled (was that always there?), I then rank #19, behind a slew of link pages.

[Marcia]

>any body tried that? Results??

I paid for one page at lycos.com that was in within a week, ranking nicely.

2) I can not understand.. Do they work as INK, per 1 page, or will they re crawl all the site starting from URL every 48 hours? I think, probably like INK

Just the one page, but the rest of the site is in there since. Most not optimized yet, but a few are ranking top ten, between 200K and 325K. The index page is now ranking in the spot the paid page was, so I changed the paid page to target the *main* phrase which is a little rough; it's a bit spammed up with some sites cross-linking a lot.

I hadn't paid much attention to FAST for a while, but these pages are ranking very similarly to Google - except they're showing the description meta.

FWIW, I just got my hands on this site end of March. It's only been up since around February, but has a lot of links already, just about all of them topically related or close.

[24bit]

I'm not impressed with Fast. Even the advanced search has poor results. Example: searched for the domain of a popular site, and it showed no pages indexed. Then did a keyword search of the company name, and it came up #1. However, the search showed no pages were supposed to be indexed. Another example: link.all:mysite.net only show 10 links. Google currently shows 24, and the new Google update should show around a 100. I could go on, but I think there's a lot of bugs in their algo and other stuff.

[heini]

24bit: did you notice Google shows internal links, while ATW does not?

Also: just because something is different than in Google doesn't mean it's a bug...

[Axacta]

heini,

Use link.all:www.yourdomain.com and it does show internal links.

[heini]

Was referring to the specific site, Axacta.

One thing is for sure though: Just because Google returns a specific selection of sites in a specific ranking does not mean this reflects how the web really is or should be. Every engine has a different view on the web.

In other words: our positions in Google are no guarantee for positions in any other engine.

I for one would really really like to see at least one other engine with a huge slice of the market.
You know, I just love alternatives from which I can choose.