FAST Ranking ?

[ziegenhirte]

Hi everybody,

firstable you have to excuse my english, but i´m still trying.
I´m interesting in the ranking methods of the search engine of FAST/Alltheweb. I know that google sets a high value on the link popularity, what about FAST ?
Thankx for your competent reply and help.

Hannes

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums ziegenhirte! :hi:

Fast is a tough one. They seem to change constantly, but I do think that link pop is in the equation. I guess when they get more popular, I will sit down and try to figure it better.

[Blue]

Welcome to the forums ziegenhirte! :hi:

I can't help you on this topic, but I can say don't worry about your english. Anybody that's multilingual gets my respect :cheers:

[MakeMeTop]

FAST relies quite heavily on link popularity but in a slightly different way to Google. Like Google, it helps to have a link from a site already in the FAST database and (like Google) a listing in the ODP can be a decent boost. Unlike Google, FAST does look at the description meta tag and uses that quite strongly. I usually find that a page which does well in Inktomi will do very well in FAST, with good inward links giving you that added edge. All in all, FAST seems to be reasonably easy to optimise for - provided you have cracked the Inktomi nut - which isn't too hard ;)

Welcome to the forums :hi:

Hope this helps a little.

[markymark]

I have to defer to MakeMeTop's greater knowledge on this, but I have not found much of a correlation between getting good ranks in Ink (which I do consistently for every site) and getting good ranks in Fast. In fact, I find Fast the most difficult to optimise for.

My own personal experience is that Fast likes a far lower keyword density in the body text than either Inktomi or Google and seems to prefer the keyphrases spread more evenly across the entire text. I am willing to be proved wrong on this, but that has been my observation.

However, MakeMeTop's point about the importance of the meta description may be the key I've been missing.

[janardan]

I noticed that some descriptions in FAST results come from ODP listings. Is it a recent development due to beta Fast Topic launch?

[MakeMeTop]

FAST have been playing around with using ODP listing descriptions in the past - though I don't see so much evidence of it now. Certainly ODP does have a pretty big influence. H tag as first line of text in body seems to work pretty well ;) along with good title and description - then keyword links to other pages on site. Certainly FAST likes a lot less keyword density than Google and a little less than Inktomi (though there are ways to satisfy both on the same page).