Next subject . . .

What about free submissions to FAST? Are they a thing of past?

According to Baker, "Free submit will continue to operate. There will be no effect on pages (already) in index. The inclusion service is simply a guarantee that your pages will be indexed regularly and are guaranteed a reservation in FAST index. The trick with free submit is amount of spam we receive through that channel. It makes it difficult to keep up with all of submissions. PartnerSite provides an economic incentive to NOT submit spam."

How quickly does FAST index free submissions?

Mr. Baker answered, "Usually within 2-6 weeks. However, 95% of what comes through free submission is spam, and that's what causes bottleneck. Also, there's no guarantee on refresh rate of those sites that we pick up through free submit. Unfortunately, it's 5% of submitters that are spammers that ruin it for rest of us. The extent that people go through to spam index is truly amazing."

Is there a penalty for submitting your site through their free Add URL?

Baker replied, "Not really. Freshness does effect rank, but only marginally. I have never seen freshness boost ranking more than 1 or 2 spaces."

What does FAST consider spam? As stated earlier, FAST estimates that an amazing 95% of submissions through their free Add URL page are spam.

Baker further explained, "Unfortunately this is case. We believe there are approximately 30 million crawlable servers globally, two-thirds of which have been blacklisted as spam servers."

Whew! Think about it: 20 MILLION crawlable servers globally are blacklisted as spam servers. If this is really true, it explains why engines have collectively gone to such great lengths in their efforts to curtail spam.

At Dallas Search Engine Strategies Conference in November, FAST introduced their new spam policies. Baker explained that according 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 something that we detect and flag as such.

You can access and read Fast's entire spam policy at: http://www.alltheweb.com/info/spampolicy.html

And, if you're so inclined, you can report spam to FAST by emailing spam@fastsearch.com.

The ultimate fear of a search engine marketer: your site has been banned. What recourse is there for a site that gets on Fast's spam list and becomes banished from 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 us that they have cleaned up their act. Obviously, this is very time consuming, so combination of PartnerSite, spam guidelines, and not having your site hosted on a banned server should enable a site to get in index through a variety of means if they think they have cleaned up their act."

Translated: If your site is hosted on one of 20 million servers tagged for spamming, you'd best move it to a different server before you initiate kiss-and-makeup ritual with FAST.

Baker further explained, "What really matters is server where submission is coming from. So many servers have been completely blacklisted due to proliferation of spam. I suggest 'know thy neighbor.' The crawler will take care of rest."

This again underscores importance of your site having its own unique IP address to insure against problems caused by an unruly site sharing same IP.

How does FAST feel about cloaking? In Dallas, Mr. Baker and I had a long discussion about cloaking and how FAST engine feels about it. We even served on a panel where a question came up about cloaking and about responsible cloaking guidelines.

As I mentioned to him, from our position as SEO's, we see issues from opposite perspectives. Of course, we don't have a front row seat to parade of spam but, even so, our viewpoint is dictated by that of legitimate businesses trying to ethically compete in arenas that are often very competitive and sometimes dominated by nefarious position jockeying. Therefore, on issue of cloaking, I pointed out instances where it's only tool available that prevents our work from being stolen. My thinking is there's no harm done provided that a person follows all of engine's guidelines and does not spam in any way.

by Robin Nobles

Of major engines in search engine universe, FAST -- aka, alltheweb.com -- is arguably most unique. In many ways, it operates differently than typical engines and, in light of recent developments, it's timely that we probe a little deeper into inner workings of this strategically important engine.

To assist us with this article we invited Stephen Baker, Fast's Director of Business Development and Marketing, to lend his perspective. As you will see, Mr. Baker was quite upfront with his answers.

FAST powers other engines!

Like Inktomi, FAST powers other search engines. For example, you're probably already aware that FAST provides primary results for Lycos search engine. But what other engines does FAST power? Mr. Baker explained,

"In North America, we power all of Lycos and Lycos Latin properties as well as Telus portals and AllTheWeb. Our focus over 2002 will be to establish broader reach in US (currently 35%). 2001 was focused on European expansion, where we power over 75% of searches. This includes Lycos Europe and all of Terra sites, T-Online, Tiscali, including Excite.it, Scandinavia Online and Web.de. Overall, we appear on over 70 portals in European market."

...obviously an important consideration for companies doing business in Latin or European markets.

FAST also has its own engine.

Unlike Inktomi, FAST has its own public search engine. As you may know, you can't submit directly to Inktomi engine itself. Instead you must submit through an Inktomi partner as well as pay a fee for inclusion. And, only recently did Position Technologies make available pure Inktomi results for searching (http://169.207.238.189/search/) although certainly not in mainstream usage since public is generally unaware this specific search option even exists.

FAST, however, provides means to submit your site directly to them via alltheweb.com -- http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php -- which they use basically as a "testing" engine. AlltheWeb is where they first consider new features such as spam detection or use of ODP categories as a training set or even linguistic analysis of non-ODP categories.

According to Mr. Baker, AlltheWeb has also begun indexing dynamic content and supports 48 languages with over 700 million full-text HTML pages in index. Using a technique called query analysis, new version of AlltheWeb will remember your choices and give you a more personal search experience. An interesting possibility is that query analysis could potentially supplant importance of link popularity sometime in future.

I asked Mr. Baker if results at one FAST powered engine will match results at another? He replied that, like Inktomi, partner engines powered by FAST use their own algorithms. He said,

"Our engine is entirely tunable, allowing customers to pre- establish offensive content, language, etc., settings. In addition, most of our customers blend FAST results with directories, PFP, and licensed results."

Fast's new pay inclusion program.

On February 25, FAST officially launched their paid inclusion program. However, typical of FAST, their paid inclusion program is unique.

Administered by partners such as Terra Lycos, Fast's PartnerSite program has four versions designed to benefit a variety of online businesses based on size. Partner Lycos calls PartnerSite program Lycos InSite Select. The first level of program provides a means by which you can pay per page and offers following benefits: