Project Playlist

Webmaster Information

The Project Playlist website includes a search engine that automatically spiders websites for our search engine index. In addition, users are freely able to submit links for their playlists. Most webmasters love links to their website because it drives traffic to their site and increases the site visibility. Many musicians, record labels, music blogs and other music related websites want links to their music files to promote their music. We provide this service for that reason. Any media files or html pages uploaded to the internet becomes part of the world wide web and, if placed in a public part of your site, become viewable by everyone and anyone. When creating your website it is important to keep this in mind.

How do I prevent my site from ever being indexed by your search engine?

The only way to make sure your files aren't indexed by our search engine is to place a robots.txt file in your main directory. Project Playlist obeys properly configured robots.txt files for what they index and link to. Please see the section "Creating a robots.txt to instruct Project Playlist" below for additional information. PLEASE NOTE: making changes to your robots.txt file will take effect the next time Project Playlist spiders your website. If you wish for your links to be immediately removed, please check the section below "How do I remove links to my site from your search engine".

How do I prevent my site from being linked to by your users?

There are two ways to prevent your files from being linked to by our users. If you wish to keep your media files publicly available to anyone with an internet connection, yet not allow users of Project Playlist to link to them, you need to make changes to the robots.txt file on your website. Please see "robots.txt for Project Playlist" below for additional information. PLEASE NOTE: making changes to your robots.txt file will take effect the next time Project Playlist spiders your website. If you wish for your links to be immediately removed, please check the section below "How do I remove links to my site from your search engine". The second option is to put your media files behind a private, password protected area of your site. This way your media files can only be accessed by authorized individuals and cannot be directly linked to. Without placing your files in a private area of your site, those files you upload to the internet become part of the world wide web and are freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Creating a robots.txt for your website to direct Project Playlist

The robots exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent web spiders and other web programs from accessing all or part of a website which is, otherwise, publicly viewable. We also utilize the robots.txt file to prevent users from linking to material on your website. For Project Playlist, our program adheres to 3 user-agent tags. Those tags are projectplaylist, projectplaylist-cache and projectplaylist-directlink. The user-agent tags are explained in greater detail below, with examples of robots.txt entries for certain circumstances.

User-agent: projectplaylist

This user-agent tag is the broadest possible tag for either blocking or allowing Project Playlist to add links to your media files to our search index.

User-agent: projectplaylist-cache

This user-agent tag directs the Project Playlist system caching mechanism and tells us what links we can and cannot cache for our search index. Many webmasters prefer that we cache a local copy of their media files for subsequent user requests to lessen the bandwidth burden that a link may impose. We created this tag to allow webmasters to opt-out of our system caching, while still allowing site owners to be part of our search index.

User-agent: projectplaylist-directlink

This user-agent tag directs Project Playlist on direct-linking. When we direct-link to a file on your website, the media file will stream directly from your site any time the file is requested. By default and as a courtesy, we cache popular links in our search index. Some website owners do not want any direct-link traffic to their site. We created this tag to allow webmasters to either allow or disallow direct-linking.

Here are a few common scenarios for a robots.txt file entry for Project Playlist.

Allow Project Playlist full, unencumbered access to my site:

• User-agent: projectplaylist
• Disallow:

Block Project Playlist from certain sections of my site:

• User-agent: projectplaylist
• Disallow: /songs/
• Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Allow Project Playlist to spider the site, but don't allow any caching (only direct-linking):

• User-agent: projectplaylist
• Disallow:
• User-agent: projectplaylist-cache
• Disallow: /

Allow Project Playlist to spider the site, but don't allow any direct-linking (only cache and serve cached version in the search index):

• User-agent: projectplaylist
• Disallow:
• User-agent: projectplaylist-cache
• Disallow:
• User-agent: projectplaylist-directlink
• Disallow: /

Block Project Playlist completely from my site:

• User-agent: projectplaylist
• Disallow: /

Feel free to configure the robots.txt file to suit your individual website needs; the examples above were just a few of the possible combinations and options.
Remember to place the robots.txt file in the root of your website. For example, if your website was http://www.test.com/ you would put the file in http://www.test.com/robots.txt. If you wanted to block the spider from a subdomain, you need to place the robots.txt in your subdomain. For example http://images.test.com/ would be placed in http://images.test.com/robots.txt.
For more general information on robots.txt, please use this link: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

How do I remove links to my site from your search engine

(NOTE: If this is a copyright claim, you need to file an official Digital Millennium Copyright Act "DMCA" take-down notice. Notices and counter-notices must meet the then-current statutory requirements imposed by the DMCA; see http://www.loc.gov/copyright/ for details. We suggest that you consult your legal advisor before filing a notice. Also, please be aware that there are penalties for false claims under the DMCA.)
First, please email webmasters@projectplaylist.com and provide the URL to each link that we have indexed on our search engine (or that our users have linked to), that you wish to be removed. This is the only way we can be sure that all links are properly removed. Note that once we remove the links, it is likely only a matter of time until they are indexed again unless you make a few changes on your website. There are things you can do to prevent indexing by our search engine and linking by our users as noted above. (NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL THIS ADDRESS UNLESS YOU ARE A WEBMASTER AND ARE NEEDING WEBMASTER ASSISTANCE -- ALL OTHER QUERIES WILL BE IGNORED. IF YOU NEED SUPPORT, PLEASE CHECK THE FORUMS)
(PLEASE NOTE: We are unable to provide support with any of the above items. Please consult a website designer or programmer for additional information).