How to Request Indexing

How we read your pages

OP servers don't originate data. Your document -- a webpage, typically -- is its own canonical source of data. OP lets you ask a server to read your document, intepret metadata like hashtags and links, and store it in a way that can be easily queried via our API or other means.

Request indexing

Pages are passively indexed by Octothorpe servers. To ask a server to index a page whenever someone visits it, add this link tag to the document's head element.

<link rel="preload" as="fetch" href="OP-SERVER/?uri=PAGE">

OP-SERVER: The URL for an Octothorpes server such as https://octothorp.es.

PAGE: The URL for the page being indexed.

This sends a GET request to the OP server's index endpoint.

A single page can request indexing from any number of servers. Include one <link> tag for each server.

When you request indexing with that <link> tag, here's what happens:

Your page sends a GET request to the server.

The ?uri= query paramenter gets sent along with this request to tell the server which page it should index. The server can only see the originating domain, this uri parameter, and an optional as parameter to define a harmonizer

You can only ask for pages on your own domain to be indexed, but any page on your domain can request any other page on your domain be indexed by sending this GET request. Adding the <link> element anywhere in your document does this on page load, but it can be done manually if you so choose.

The server checks to see if this domain is allowed.

OP servers can set different policies for who is allowed to send data to them. The main server at octothorp.es, for example, requires registration. So that server checks if the domain requested for indexing has been registered. If it is, it will get indexed. Otherwise it won't.

The uri gets indexed.

The server will request the HTML body of uri in order to index it. It will not make more than 1 request every five minutes to avoid DDoSing you and to prevent bots from DDoSing us.

This request is just a regular fetch request to GET your page. It should not impact your server any more than a single user visiting your site would. It uses a harmonizer to check what statements it should record.

In this section

Use a Button — Add an OP server badge to your page that triggers indexing on load.

Approve Indexing Without Requesting — Declare indexing permission with a meta tag so OP can index pages that don't actively request it.

Actively Request Indexing — Send direct GET or POST requests to index a specific page.