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I've tried submitting for three years now and only gotten into Fast for a couple of months and then one day the site was just gone from the listing. I've tried adjusting the meta to avoid what might be key word spam. I've tried both short /topic.html and full internal links. I've tried submitting both h...mysite.com/ and h...mysite.com/index.html, nothing works.
I've joined Lycos and submitted as a member which is supposed to get my home page listed, it didn't. When I was able to get past the automated help response which suggested I pay for the listing, I was told there was nothing wrong with the site and I should submit again which again didn't work. I've tried submitting through Lycos in other countries, I've added a Fast, an All the Web and a Lycos search box to internal pages, I'm in Hotbot through Ink and in the Lycos Directory through DMOZ but of course their search doesn't find that.
I've even considered if it's the hyphen in the url and title which does have an affect on boolian searches where a (-) means don't find. I do have about a 100 pages that are identical except for number on the charts I've tried putting robot exclusions on these if that could be a cause of rejection. The site is hosted on a "free server" which I pay to be free of their ads and for extra bandwidth and I own my domain name. I have wondered if the free domains out there for my site could be considered spamming, but I only submit the paid domain.
One last thing. Each time I've gotten through and someone from Lycos or Fast looked over the situation, pages linking to my site that would come up in searches for my site would drop out of the listing. I had comet and search hippo and a directory linking direct to my page within a frame and those listing went away after I inquired about mine, is it my site or what?
Comments, suggestions, jokes?
[edited by: heini at 8:55 am (utc) on Aug. 2, 2002]
[edit reason] we don't do site reviews - thanks [/edit]
Have you tried putting Bretts Sim Spider [searchengineworld.com] on it?
What about your logs, does they show the Fast crawler visiting? If so, how many pages does it take - all of them? None?
Adult words shouldn't keep Fast from spidering your site. Not being listed for 3 years sounds very strange and I'd say anything's possible.
Com' on, anybody have a clue here?
The site is listed pretty much everywhere else that matters, including Google, Yahoo, DMOZ, Ink, etc.
The only other search I can't get on is Scrub the Web and they told me this . . .
"STW randomly indexes submitted sites at this time which probably explains why you have not made it in the index. Even I have two personal sites and have only been lucky enough to get one indexed. However a new Scrubby bot will be released within the next couple of months. In fact our entire robot and search engine has been undergoing a complete rewrite. Right now we have no control over what Scrubby indexes and doesn't index. Scrubby just runs and runs and runs... We should see much improvement over the new system. That's about all I know at this time."
I have a theory, but it is only a theory as to what my particular problem is:
Years ago I when I started on a free host, I bought a domain and paid for forwarding by the registrar to my website. Not really knowing what I was doing, I started using this domain when asking for links back. (I was considering moving to a new host so it seemed like a prudent thing at the time.)
So, my luck is that ATW spiders that forwarding domain in first and considers it the site, while the real site on its present host cannot get listed. That is my theory anyway.
Robert could something like that be effecting you?
No, there is something the Fast spider doesn't like about my site and I'd sure like to know what it is. The only other thing I can come up with is perhaps I've submitted the site too often from my email/dial-up IP address, maybe it would help if a few others would be kind enough to submit the site to Fast, otherwise it's really subtle or just plain nuts which it's making me. :-(
Having a dmoz listing and other good inbound links is the best way to get picked up by FAST. If you still do not get included over a long period of time I'm afraid FAST really has some problem with your site.
Sorry to say that, but if you are keen on getting listed you could always pay...
Another question: Did you try and look if any sites from your IP are listed in ATW? You could use the IP search under the advanced options.
Did you always use this much bold text ? The pages might seem statistically strange compared to an average page, due to the low ratio regular-to-bold text..
It is conceivable that Fast would use a spam-filter on this if bold text were to help rankings..
I'm not looking for a site review, don't care what people think of it, it's just a hobby site, but it is making me nuts trying to figure out what keeps it out of Lycos/ATW/Fast and still leaves it acceptable to all other major and most minor search and directories. Some have suggested Fast/ATW/Lycos consider more than three of any key word to be spam. As another minor engine I can't get in says more than seven times is spam I trimmed them down to six or fewer appearences in various forms of phrases, again no success.
A red herring might be all the mistakes on the site the html validator finds, they are mostly in code from outside sources such as my news feed, affiliate links and web stats provider (funny how that works).
Where's all the Fast experts? Someone's gotta have a clue for me!
>errors
You should however try to correct those and get your pages validating. Not sure if this prevents the site from getting listed, though.
At this point Fast appears to be somewhat erratic with getting at new sites which they have not indexed yet.
In general, as frustrating as it may sound, Fast like any other engine is completely free as to what they index or not. No engine indexes all the web, they all leave out significant portions.
If you're really that keen on getting listed you might consider paying for just one page and see what happens.
The site is a legitimate free resource it should be listed free in anything calling itself a general search engine and other than Lycos/Fast it is. I can't understand it, sorry.
