Fast Mystery

Fast tells pages are indexed, but doesn't show them

[WebWriter]

Hello, I'm a newbie here. I don't hope I ask a question already much discussed, but until now I couldn't find the answer.

33 Pages of one of my sites are indexed by Fast. When I search for the URL of the main page, ATW tells: 'no entries'. But on the other hand ATW tells, below: 'find all 33 pages indexed under [URL]'.

So the pages are indexed, but not findable. This is the case since approx. 4 months. Is there anybody who could resolve this mystery?

[takagi]

Hi WebWriter, Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Just for my understanding. If you enter the URL (www.yourdomain.com), you can see a page with the Title, Url and a few lines lower:

Find all 33 web pages indexed under "www.yourdomain.com"

You click on the 'all 33 web pages indexed' and the next page says 'no entries'! Right?

Never seen something like that. Is the page clean of SEO tricks?

[heini]

Welcome WebWriter

Ditto what Takagi says. Have done some tests but couldn't reproduce the problem. Thought it might be related to some filters, but the Url Investigator feature obviously ignores personal filter settings.

[WebWriter]

Thanks Takagi and Heini for responding that quick.

Takagi> No, when I type "mydomain.com" ATW says: no entries found, but below it says: "find all 33 webpages indexed under 'mydomain.com' "
When you click on this last link, you see all the pages.

So they ARE in the index, but ATW doesn't want to show them; they're not 'searchable' with keywords.

In the beginning of this site, 7 months ago, some pages showed up using keywords, but that ended quickly.
All The SITES had yet another phenomenon: a few times (in a day) they showed up, and on the other moments they didn't.

I'm not aware of any SEO-tricks, except maybe that some of the page titles are in CAPS and I heard some engines don't like that.
In Google, Inktomi, etc. the site is doing well.

BTW: it's not only about the 'well being' of this site - I'm just curious and try to understand the functioning of FAST.

[edited by: WebWriter at 2:48 pm (utc) on June 16, 2003]

[heini]

Ack, sounds like something not intended. I would try this:
[alltheweb.com...]

[takagi]

Just like heini, I can only think of some language filtering or content (adult) filtering. Not saying that your site falls into such a category (it could be that FAST incorrectly decided your site should be filtered). Well, please keep us informed about new developments of this mystery.

[Ankheg]

I have this problem with one of my sites, too. AFAICT, the problem is that FAST has indexed my home page as www.widget.com, not www.widget.com/index.html. I believe this is because the site's home page wasn't submitted, some content pages were, and following the links from those pages to the home page it never "saw" /, just /index.html.

Even though there are several (9) other sites linking to my home page as just www.widget.com, a larger number of links (all my pages) link to /index.html, which FAST can presumably tell is identical, content-wise.

I don't worry about it.

Just my 0.02.

[WebWriter]

Mystery partly solved now: indeed, it seems to be a filter problem.
When switching the filter off on ATW, all pages show up - although the site isn't adult orientated at all. Same effect on Lycos, when switching filter off. Only on ATS there seems not to be this possibility.

I wonder how this could happen. I'll contact ATW, especially because the filter setting I had seem to be default.