AlltheWeb Content Guidelines

AlltheWeb content guidelines are intended to give content providers a clear indication as to what types of content are desired and undesired in the AlltheWeb Index with the goal of providing a satisfying and relevant search experience to the end user community. This document provides examples of appropriate and inappropriate content creation techniques and is not intended to be a comprehensive list of dos and don'ts. The content will be judged as to whether it is helping or hurting the relevancy of AlltheWeb search results via both human and automated techniques.

Techniques content providers should use:

• Create a site containing unique high quality content with clear navigation and an intuitive hierarchy.
• Link appropriately to interesting and useful content and make sure your own content is linked to from other pages on the web (one inbound link per page is the minimum!).
• Include Metadata (Title, description and keywords) that reflects the specific content of the page.
• When writing your pages, think about using words or phrases that people are more likely to type in a search box to find your pages

Many web pages are either of little or no value to users or are designed to intentionally trick a search engine into including inappropriate or low value results in response to a query. Search engines and users often refer to these listings as "search engine spam". AlltheWeb is constantly patrolling the index to remove spam in order to improve the quality of search results and the end user experience.

Some examples of pages that exhibit "spam" techniques are:

• Pages that negatively affect the ranking precision and diversity of search results.
• Pages that give the search engine content that is topically different than the page the user sees (often referred to as "cloaking").
• Pages created exclusively for the purpose of stealthily redirecting the user to another page (often built to be attractive to a specific search engine).
• Excessively cross-linking between pages or sites to artificially inflate link popularity.
• Pages stuffed with superfluous keywords that are irrelevant or do not make meaningful sense.
• Pages, subdomains or domains that have substantially or very similar content.
• Automatically generated pages created with the purpose of flooding search engine result pages.
• The use of hidden text and hidden links.

Report spam

If you would like to report an instance of spam in our index please send an email entitled "Spam Report" to spam_websearch@overture.com. In the mail please set out the search query you performed, and the URLs of the pages you believe exhibit spam techniques.

Dispute a spam judgment

If you think your site has been blacklisted in error or you have cleaned up your act, please email spam_websearch@overture.com and have us review your site.

Include your URL in the AlltheWeb Index

To include your URL in the AlltheWeb Index, please visit http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/submit_site for a variety of free and paid inclusion options.

Spam Policy 2003-03-14