Submit Your Site to AltaVista

Once you've laid the groundwork, submitting your site to AltaVista is a relatively simple and painless process. Follow this link to AltaVista's Add/Remove a URL page. When you submit a URL, AltaVista first verifies it and then adds it to its index. Once indexed, the page should be available for search engine queries within a few days. However, indexing on the AltaVista mirror sites can take up to three weeks.

To add your site's URL, complete the form in the middle of AltaVista's Add/Remove a URL page. This form looks like a small search field and starts with "http://." Simply type your URL and press "Submit." This sounds easy to do, but it's critical that you spell the URL correctly, including upper- and lowercase letters.

You should need to submit only your "gateway page" -- better known as the home page or main page. The URL of your gateway page will read something like "http://www.yourdomain.com" if you have your own domain name, or "http://www.someisp/~mypage" if you don't own a domain. Theoretically, Scooter indexes your gateway page and every page you have a link to, both in your site (all your subpages) and outside your site (links that take visitors outside your site). It just keeps crawling more and more deeply. This is why you should submit only your site's gateway page unless you have pages in your site that aren't linked to the main page.

A word of caution: AltaVista will accept only 10 URLs per domain in a 24-hour period; if you submit more than 50 URLs in a 24-hour period, your domain will be removed from the AltaVista database altogether.

Copyright © 1995-1999 Pinnacle WebWorkz Inc. All rights reserved. Do notduplicate or redistribute in any form.

« Get more advice every month. Click here to subscribe to Inc. magazine!

Try a RISK-FREE Issue of Inc. Today!

Renew | Contact Us | Current Issue

Select Services