Note that hosting companies are continuously changing the details of their service. If you discover something here that is out-of-date please contact us.

• How do I index my AOL site?
• How do I index my Homestead site?

• How do I index my Safeshopper site?

Q. How do I index my AOL site?
A. How you index this site depends on how you coded up the links on your site.

If you used purely relative links like "page1.html" or "..\dir2\page2.html" (i.e. no leading "http://" nor a leading "/"), then you can simply change your web address to the actual location of your pages. If the address of your site is:
   http://hometown.aol.com/mysite/index.html
change your account's address to:    http://members.hometown.aol.com/_ht_a/mysite/index.html
and then respider (reindex) your site.

If any of the links to other pages in your site start with either "http://" or "/" then you will need to add the additional starting points:
   http://hometown.aol.com/_ht_a/mysite/index.html
   http://members.hometown.aol.com/mysite/index.html
This will allow the spider to follow links through the AOL advertising frameset to the actual content of your site.
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Q. How do I index my "Homestead" site?
A. Homestead sites are unusual in that your pages are automatically duplicated by homestead so that a special version of your page can be served to whichever brand of browser your visitor is using. These additional pages always end with "~ns3.html" and "~ns4.html". You can use the following exclusion to prevent them from being indexed:
   *~ns?.html
For information on exclusions read How to Exclude Pages from Search.

Note: Homestead recently changed their service so that only pages you create with their SiteBuilder tool can be indexed. All other pages will use "dynamic web addresses" which will prevent links to those pages from being used after your site is indexed. If you click on one of those links you get an error message: "this page has expired".

This is not a search engine problem, but a hosting problem. If you cannot use their SiteBuilder 100% of the time and you want to have a search feature on your site, you will need to use a different hosting company.
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Q. How do I index my Safeshopper site?
A. SafeShopper sites are unusual in that every link on their sites is unique! This results in a dramatically high page count. The solution is to instruct the spider to strip "query strings" in the links it follows. Since it is not possible for you to properly modify your safeshopper pages to do this, we have created a "setup" file for you to use:
   http://www.freefind.com/setup/safeshopper.html
This file also has detailed instructions on its use. Basically, you will need to change your account's primary URL (web address) to the setup file address and then set your safeshopper address as an additional spider starting point.
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