Indexing & Content Guidelines
What earns a place in the Aloha Search index, how our crawler treats your site, and the standards we hold listings to. Read this before you submit a website.
1. What we index
Aloha Search is a local index for Hawaiʻi. We prioritize websites with a genuine connection to the islands:
- Businesses, makers, and services operating in Hawaiʻi
- Guides, blogs, and resources about island travel, food, culture, and the outdoors
- Nonprofits, community groups, and events rooted in the islands
2. Quality standards
We favor sites that are useful and trustworthy: original content, a clear purpose, working pages, a secure (https) connection, and reasonable load times. A good description and accurate category help us place you correctly.
3. What we don't index
Some sites won't be accepted, including:
- Spam, thin doorway pages, or auto-generated content with no real value
- Sites with malware, deceptive downloads, or misleading claims
- Adult content, illegal goods, or anything that endangers island communities or the ʻāina
- Pure link farms or sites with no Hawaiʻi relevance
4. How crawling works
Once a submission passes review, our crawler (AlohaBot) visits the URL, reads the page and its main links, and adds eligible pages to the index. We respect robots.txt and standard crawl directives — if you disallow AlohaBot, we won't index those paths.
Indexing typically completes within a few days. Re-crawls happen periodically so your listing stays fresh.
5. Updating or removing a site
Need to update how your site appears, or remove it from the index? Submit the URL again with a note, or email index@aloh.as. You can also block AlohaBot in your robots.txt to opt out.