Algo / Db tweak

[jimmykav]

The SERPS for my #1 keyword have changed yet again and indicate that a fairly major tweak has been made somewhere.

My home page had sunk to page two of the serps for my keyword. After contacting fast it rose back to #1.

Now it appears to have gone completely. A sub page now appears around page #5 of the serps but the home page does not appear at all fromwhat I can see so far.

What is really strange is that for primary phrase I almost completely fill the first 100 results but the home page still does not appear, only sub pages.

[heini]

Don't know, Jimmy - I suspect a lot of the confusion arising from time to time here about pages vanishing, sites for a short time filling serps completely up, as well as index pages vanishing from the face of the earth has to do with the site collapsing process at ATW.
I think this process osometimes is instable.

[jimmykav]

Thanks for the info heini.

It really does look like the home page has dropped through the cracks somewhere,

If i type in URL for the home page FAST comes back with nothing but sub pages from my site or links from external sites.

[jimmykav]

Finally figured out what is going on.

AllTheWeb defaults to searching in "English"

When I changed that to "Any Language" my home page comes up at #1

The home page as a meta tag
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-ie">

none of the sub pages have this tag which is why they were appearing in the SERPS.

It appears that FAST does not think en-ie is english!

[Rumbas]

That's interesting Jimmy. You think FAST wasn't showing your page because of that tag?

If so, it could be because of wrong formatting. Just use

content="en"

Check out PG1's answers here about the language tag [webmasterworld.com].

[jimmykav]

Reasonably sure Rumbas.
It is the only language orientated tag on the page. None of my other pages have a language tag at all.

[Rumbas]

So, was it the tag or the (wrong?) formatting that prevented it from showing?

If it's the tag, I wonder if it works the other way around? Eg. putting in 'de' would make the page show only at searches for german language?

Heck, maybe even better to just leave it out completly and let FAST figure it out?

[jimmykav]

I think it was the tag.

The tag has been in since i created that page about two years ago. The fact that the page stopped showing up in the SERPS for English this week inidcates :

1) the algo to figure out a pages language has changed recently

or

2) that the default FAST search mode has changed from "Any Language" to "English" recently and I never paid attention to what the mode was before.

[heini]

Very interesting, Jimmy. Actually ATW has just started the Automatic Language Mapping [fastsearch.com]:

AlltheWeb now determines the country from which a user’s query is originating and provides relevant results in the user’s local language as well as in English. ... Although the local language and English are provided as the default languages, users will still be able to override the default language by selecting from the 49 languages available through AlltheWeb’s customized settings.

[Brian]

My home page has vanished from Fast. It is 100% html, with nothing fancy or new. Simply gone.

[jimmykav]

Hi Brian

FAST has been all over the place for my home page during the last two weeks.

After my site went AWOL in the English listings it suddenly appeared again about a week ago.

It stayed in the SERPS for about two days and then it went completely AWOL from both English and International SERPS.

Yesterday it reappeared in International SERPS but is still missing in the English ones.

[jimmykav]

I am back in the English results with full description.

[Josk]

A contact of mine at FAST indicates that keywords are being lifted more from the page titles... Can anyone confirm this?