Altavista, Excite, Lycos, HotBot, Yahoo question

Our site was submitting itself from an old script!

[Travoli]

Hey all, I just searched the archives and could not find any message threads that answered my question. I just came to work at my .com weeks ago, with the job to Optimize our site, among other things. I found out today that previous programmers left a script running. The script submitted our site to Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, once per week. So when I heard this I freaked out, and typed host://www.oursite.com into Altavista. No results. Does this mean we are banned? I searched for our domain name, and results came up, but I am not sure if these are secondary results. I know we are ok on Excite, we rank well with a great keyword. Lycos lists us, but again, not sure if they are primary results.

I asked them to stop the script. How often is appropriate for these engines? I keep hearing about 5/day but, realistically, for the same site and same URL, how often in a month is good, and what is too much? thanks!

[miles]

About 2 or 3 months ago AV changed the way that you can submit. So a auto submitter would not be a problem, in fact you may have an error message on the program submit history when you look at the AV section. Also if you submit to all of the engines once a week you will be safe. What you want to watch out for is submitting to AV 15 times in the same day. Then you will get banned for certian.

As far as how many times a day, 5 is safe and easy to keep track of. You want to submit all of the urls to in the site and repeat, but you dont want to submit the same url e.g. index.html all day every day.

[Travoli]

Ok. Any ideas about Altavista not returning any results for my domain name?

[DaveAtIFG]

Based on my own recent experience, I'd guess that your domain is banned. I emailed AV about one of mine. They responded by pointing me to a web page that lists half a dozen reasons why I may be banned, like Google, they refuse to provide a specific reason.

I also over submitted with a runaway script. I'm convinced that AV has no sense of humor about this. The fact that they went to an "enter the secret code to submit" type submission page reenforces my conclusion.