New InSites into the FAST Search Engine . . . an interview with Stephen Baker of Fast, Part 2

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from Part 1)Next subject . .
.What about free ... to FAST? Are they a thing of thepast? ...
to Baker, "Free submit will continue to operate. ...
be no effect on pages (a (Continued from Part 1)Next subject . .
.What about free submissions to FAST? Are they a thing of thepast? According to Baker, "Free submit will continue to operate. Therewill be no effect on pages (already) in the index.
The inclusionservice is simply a guarantee that your pages will be indexedregularly and are guaranteed a reservation in the FAST index.The trick with free submit is the amount of spam we receivethrough that channel. It makes it difficult to keep up with allof the submissions.
PartnerSite provides an economic incentive toNOT submit spam."How quickly does FAST index free submissions? Mr. Baker answered, "Usually within 2-6 weeks.
However, 95% ofwhat comes through free submission is spam, and that's whatcauses the bottleneck. Also, there's no guarantee on the refreshrate of those sites that we pick up through free submit.Unfortunately, it's the 5% of the submitters that are spammersthat ruin it for the rest of us.
The extent that people gothrough to spam the index is truly amazing." Is there a penalty for submitting your site through their freeAdd URL? Baker replied, "Not really. Freshness does effect rank, but onlymarginally.
I have never seen freshness boost ranking more than 1or 2 spaces." What does FAST consider spam? As stated earlier, FAST estimatesthat an amazing 95% of the submissions through their free Add URLpage are spam. Baker further explained, "Unfortunately this is the case.
Webelieve there are approximately 30 million crawlable serversglobally, two-thirds of which have been blacklisted as spamservers." Whew! Think about it: 20 MILLION crawlable servers globally areblacklisted as spam servers. If this is really true, it explainswhy the engines have collectively gone to such great lengths intheir efforts to curtail spam.
At the Dallas Search Engine Strategies Conference in November,FAST introduced their new spam policies. Baker explained thataccording to FAST, spam comes in three different categories: * Page Spam, which consists of any measures to boost ranking,such as link farms, etc.
* Spam stuffing, such as keyword stuffing, invisible text, etc. * Offensive content, which is not so much spam, but is somethingthat we detect and flag as such.
You can access and read Fast's entire spam policy at:http://www.alltheweb.com/info/spampolicy.htmlAnd, if you're so inclined, you can report spam to FAST byemailing [email protected]. The ultimate fear of a search engine marketer: your site has beenbanned.
What recourse is there for a site that gets on Fast'sspam list and becomes banished from the engine? Is this forever? Baker replied, "This really is handled on a case by case basis.We have worked with sites that have contacted us and informed usthat they have cleaned up their act. Obviously, this is very timeconsuming, so the combination of PartnerSite, the spamguidelines, and not having your site hosted on a banned servershould enable a site to get in the index through a variety ofmeans if they think they have cleaned up their act." Translated: If your site is hosted on one of the 20 millionservers tagged for spamming, you'd best move it to a differentserver before you initiate the kiss-and-makeup ritual with FAST.
Baker further explained, "What really matters is the server wherethe submission is coming from. So many servers have beencompletely blacklisted due to the proliferation of spam.
Isuggest 'know thy neighbor.' The crawler will take care of therest." This again underscores the importance of your site having its ownunique IP address to insure against problems caused by an unrulysite sharing the same IP. How does FAST feel about cloaking? In Dallas, Mr.
Baker and Ihad a long discussion about cloaking and how the FAST enginefeels about it. We even served on a panel where a question cameup about cloaking and about responsible cloaking guidelines.
As I mentioned to him, from our position as SEO's, we see theissues from opposite perspectives. Of course, we don't have afront row seat to the parade of spam but, even so, our viewpointis dictated by that of legitimate businesses trying to ethicallycompete in arenas that are often very competitive and sometimesdominated by nefarious position jockeying.
Therefore, on theissue of cloaking, I pointed out instances where it's the onlytool available that prevents our work from being stolen. Mythinking is there's no harm done provided that a person followsall of the engine's guidelines and does not spam in any way.
Baker's response: "Unfortunately, the 20% of sites that useredirects maliciously ruin it for the rest. Redirects and cloakshave become such a hassle that we can't afford to risk indexingthem.
We do work through PartnerSite IV customers to indexcloaks. However, they are sent through a rigorous spam-detectionprocess." When I asked if we could show we're not trying to hide anything -- perhaps form a partnership aimed at quality control within theframework of cloaking? His reply, "I agree with that.
That is thebest option."The rest of the our dialogue went like this... Robin: Does it have to be PartnerSite IV -- some small companiescouldn't quite afford that option.Baker: Currently, it would be through PartnerSite IV.
However, wedo plan to extend that offering to the other PartnerSite versionsin the future.Robin: Since redirects are frowned upon, what should you do ifyou've moved your entire site, for example, and you need todirect traffic to the new domain? Baker: It is always best to use META REFRESH tags rather thanJavaScript to implement redirects if you want search engines toknow about it. Most search engines do not fully parse JavaScriptsto find out what they actually do.
Using a META REFRESH tag tellsus in a much better way what you are trying to achieve so that wecan do whatever we think is most sensible with the page. How to score at the top of FAST .
. .Now let's get down to the nitty gritty.
What does it take toachieve a top ranked page with FAST? Here are some tips from the FAST rep himself: Baker suggests,"Good content that is unique, not general, always has the'authoritative' effect and people begin to link to that site.This achieves good scores in the two areas we care most about: 1) Static Rank, which is link analysis, and 2) Dynamic Rank, which is keywords and content."Also . .
."Get a handful of authoritative sites linking to you. Linkpopularity plays a large factor in determining rank.
If yoursite is diverse, with multiple focuses, make sure the pages arewell written, keywords are appropriately placed, and have ahandful of authoritative sites linking to the site." Baker added, "The trick, in my experience, is to get a handful ofreally good sites to link to a site that is non-thematic." How important is link popularity with FAST? As with mostengines, link popularity is an extremely important factor indetermining relevancy. Baker explains as follows, "Be concerned with links in, not linksout.
Link score is part of the relevancy calculation and has aformulaic impact on ranking. However, if a site has no linkscore, ranking is negatively impacted." I asked him, "Is link popularity is based on the entire site, oron individual pages? In other words, if one page has a high linkpopularity, will all the pages of a site be boosted, or only thatone page?" His reply, "Just that one page." So, if your site has no links pointing to it, you'll likely rankpoorly but the site can still be indexed provided the FAST spidercan find it.
Robin: Does FAST make allowances for brand new sites? Baker: "Not currently, but we are beginning to work with some ofthe new domains that are popping up." Robin: Do links from pages on your own site count toward buildinglink popularity? Baker: "No . .
. that would be too easy." ...he said with asmile.
Robin: How does FAST deal with asp and database-generated pages?Baker: "As long as they are not forms and they are linked to, wecan crawl them. Of course, the PartnerSite service has theability to index dynamic pages as well."Conclusive remarks .
. .As with most engines FAST sees spam as public enemy number one.They've identified two-thirds of the servers in the world as spamservers.
The best way to gain entrance into the FAST index is tomake certain that your site does not fall into any of their spamcategories. We suggest you take a few minutes to review their spam policy.
For guaranteed indexing and respidering every 48 hours, givetheir paid inclusion a test. The primary benefit being that youcan experiment with keyword factors that boost relevancy and seethe results of your tests in 48 hours or less.
Remember, paid inclusion guarantees your space in the directoryand provides you the opportunity to experiment endlessly withrelevancy factors within your page for a whole year. Focus your attention on gaining high quality incoming links.Doing so will increase what FAST calls your "link score" (aka,link popularity).
Remember also that sites with no incoming linksare actually negatively impacted. All other factors being equal, the freshest (most recent) pagewins by an ever-so-slight boost in relevancy.
There are many waysto maintain site "freshness," such as using server side includes.For shades of things to come, keep an eye on alltheweb.com --we'll be watching to see how query analysis develops as adeterminer of page relevancy in the near future. Copyright 2002 Robin Nobles.
All rights reserved. Article Tags: Search Engine, Does Fast, About Cloaking, Link Popularity Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .