AltaVista Search Network
Submitting New URLs
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Please submit only one URL. Our crawler, Scooter, will eventually explore your entire site by following links.
Do not submit a description or keywords with a URL. To control the abstract served back with your page, use META tags.
Remember that URLs are case-sensitive, and please check your spelling.
If the page is successfully fetched, it is added to the index. It should be available for queries typically in less than a day, possibly two days for our mirror sites.

We also accept submissions of URLs through Scott Banister's Submit It! service and Net Creations PostMaster services.

Removing Pages from the Index

To remove a bad link from the index, simply resubmit the URL. All URLs that return a 404 are removed from the index within a day or two of being submited.
To remove a page that does exist from the index, it will be necessary to write a robots.txt file for the site.
To exclude all pages of a site from the index, it will be necessary to write a robots.txt file for the site.

A small number of sites regularly submit a large number of pages to the AltaVista index in the hope of showing very frequently on our result pages. The usual technique is to submit pages with numerous keywords, or with keywords unrelated to the real content of the pages. ? Some people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what browsers will see. We strongly discourage the use of these techniques.

AltaVista is an index, not a repository for pages of low or misleading informational value. Attempts to fill it with misleading or promotional pages lowers the value of the index for everyone. Left unchecked, this behavior would make Web indexes worthless. We will disallow URL submissions from those who spam the index. In extreme cases, we will exclude all their pages from the index.


DIGITAL Equipment Corporation