Lycos UK changes?

Doorway and site pages dropped

[webgeneral]

Is anyone aware of any major changes to the way Lycos UK ranks pages. Since last month I have lost 5 top 20 positions and can't even find them in the top 100?

[tigger]

hi

sorry not had the time to look at all my clients but of the ones I did, thank god, are still in same place and there doorways

[NFFC]

Hi webgeneral welcome to WmW,

>any major changes to the way Lycos UK ranks pages

In a word no, having said that they do seem to have had a major clear out of "pages with similar content".

[webgeneral]

Thanks for that NFFC, my doorways have the same body text but have different keywords on each page in the various tags. Is it looking primarily at the body text when deciding?

[makemetop]

Having looked I've noticed a couple of things. There has certainly been an overhaul of the results and some changes. On my main benchmark phrase 'search engine optimisation' my first (directory) listing is the same (with a very weird title) however my SE listing is the same title and description which is in FAST (previously they seemed to be from their own DB) and (even stranger) this title and description appears to have been pulled from my listing at Direct Hit. Whereas in FAST it used to be a 'Google-like' listing it now shows my meta description tag as it was pre-September and the only place where it is listed like that is in Direct Hit.

Too much to work out on a Friday!

[NFFC]

>have the same body text

That's what I am seeing, pages with the same body text bar the keywords have been dropped.

[oldtimer]

I've seen some changes but not consistent.

One site has numerous pages that were pulled out of the site last autumn. They were still top listings earlier this month all going to 404s. In the last 10 days some have been dropped but there are still plenty there. A few of them have had their text replaced by that of the index page - result now, several duplicate pages in the top 10

All the descriptions (of the normal pages - I can't check the removed ones) are taken from the body text - from the top. The titles are almost 'humanised' - not taken from metas/title but the words appear scattered through the text. This title however reads well. There is one word 'coast' in the Lycos title that does not appear anywhere in the text or metas - but is in fact accurate for the site.

??confused??!

[FreeBee]

We haven't been paying attention to some of our rankings which have clearly disappeared from Lycos UK - can't say when we were dropped.

I'm not sure that this is the correct forum for this query - we're busy with fresh content for the site that was dropped.

Has there been any major change in the algo in the last 6 months or so? What are the most important ranking criteria that need to be considered?