#Archive org how to
#Archive org archive

We tested it and found that there is in fact no auto-reply, so it seems a bit like shouting into a hole in the ground. The exact language they use is: How can I exclude or remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine? You can send an email request for us to review to with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.īut when you send them an email with the requested information there is no reply, at least not immediately. If ia_archiver no longer works, what does?Īccording to, the best way to remove a site is to send them an email to and request they remove it. But then quietly changed things and everyones content started to be scraped again. Since only Webmasters are supposed to have editing access to a sites robots.txt file this seemed like a pretty good way to do it. So you see, t he correct way to stop from copying your site wasto add ia_archiver to the robots.txt disallow file and no longer is.

#Archive org archive

It might be assumed that the people at have changed their minds and that now The Internet Archive is interested in offering access to web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection. Ironically, you can still see the defunct exclusion page on WayBack machine.

To exclude the Internet Archive’s crawler (and remove documents from the Wayback Machine) while allowing all other robots to crawl your site, your robots.txt file should say: User-agent: ia_archiver

It will tell us not to crawl your site in the future.

It will remove documents from your domain from the Wayback Machine.

To remove your site from the Wayback Machine, place a robots.txt file at the top level of your site (e.g. The Internet Archive is not interested in offering access to web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection.

According to the now defunct exclusion page: Why does everyone think ia_archiver is an bot?īecause it used to be. While they seem very keen on fulfilling their purposes, they seem to have overlooked the wishes of website owners who do not want their intellectual property scraped and displayed. You can read their post about it here, but one of the important points they claim is: 'Over time we have observed that the robots.txt files that are geared toward search engine crawlers do not necessarily serve our archival purposes.' The folks at said that robots.txt files don't serve the purpose of an archive site. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive when a three-dimensional index was built to allow for the browsing of archived web content.' and that ' Brewster Kahle founded the archive in May 1996 at around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. Is there a connection between and Alexa?

It will not disallow (Wayback Machine) but will instead block Alexa from crawling your site. That means that if you use robots.txt exclusion like this: User-agent: ia_archiver How do we know? The screenshot below comes from this Alexa webpage. Spoiler alert: Internet Archive did remove our site once we asked, but the robots.txt method did not work. This is the most accurate information we can find about it as of this writing.

#Archive org how to

There is a lot of apparently bad / old / inaccurate information out in the world about how to block, otherwise known as 'The Wayback Machine' from scraping your site.