Lycos Sympatico

[Brett_Tabke]

Suddenly getting a large number of referrals from Sympatico (Lycos).
An interesting phenom that I can't explain. Not just one domain either - 20-30.

[search.sli.sympatico.ca]

[NFFC]

Same here, started a few weeks ago, maybe they take longer to update their Fast data?

[msgraph]

This is the order on engines I received after getting listed well in FAST. Like you said NFFC, probably just takes time to ripple across the other engines.

FAST / alltheweb.com
Evreka
Spray
Lycos
Sympatico

[Air]

As you know BT, Sympatico is a pretty big ISP owned by Bell Canada, my sister uses them, she said they recently put up a new start page for subscribers, that may explain it.

[rencke]

I think I have at least part of the solution to the mystery. There has been a change of algo at Fast in one or both of two separate index db:s very recently, this week or late last. This would affect not just Fast itself, but also Evreka, Spray, Lycos and Sympatico and a number of national SE:s in Europe using Fast for primary or secondary results.

One of my sites suddenly tops not just Sympatico's popularity section (Direct Hit) which was to be expected, but also - and for the first time ever - alternates between the #2 and #16 spots under "General", i.e. pure Fast. (Double checked, and alltheweb.com shows exactly the same two different ranking orders as Sympatico for alternating searches.) The keyword has 2,8 million pages, so I am well pleased.

It appears that keyword density in title and keyword in headers plays a greater role than before. Link pop does not seem to be taken into account only if title and headers are ok, nor keyword in url.

[Brett_Tabke]

If I'd noticed a increase from Lycos and Fast proper recently, I would have written it off to that last Fast db update. I think Air has the answer. Nothing like a good update or news story to kick some fresh traffic.

[rencke]

> Nothing like a good update or news story to kick some fresh traffic.

How about moving from page 500 to page 1? Have you checked that?