What can ACAP do for me?

Implement ACAP
What do I need to do to use ACAP on my website?
ACAP may be already be used in a variety of different business contexts, but its main initial purpose is for communicating access and usage permissions to web crawlers (also known as ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’) – the automated processes employed by search engine operators and others to “crawl” the web and harvest content for use in their services.

There are two stages to using ACAP on your website for communicating permissions to web crawlers. They are: implementation and verification.

1. Implementation
Implementing ACAP involves making some important changes to your website. These are of two kinds:

* changes to your ‘robots.txt’ file
* changes to content resources

The simplest way of communicating permissions information to web crawlers is through a ‘robots.txt’ file placed on your web server. If you already have a ‘robots.txt’ file, this will need to be modified to contain ACAP permissions in addition to the information that it already contains (remember that not all web crawlers will be able to interpret ACAP permissions, for a while at least, so you should retain the existing content of your ‘robots.txt’ file).

To save time and effort in modifying existing ‘robots.txt’ files, a tool for converting them to include the corresponding ACAP permissions is available here: >.

However, to gain the full benefit of using ACAP, you will need to make further modifications to ensure that the permissions say exactly what you need them to say. How to modify your ‘robots.txt’ file is explained in the ACAP Technical Framework documentation, which you will find here: >.

Another way of communicating permissions information to web crawlers is by embedding permissions information directly in the content resources themselves. ACAP permissions can be embedded in almost any kind of web resource, and how to do so is explained in the ACAP Technical Framework documentation, which you will find here: >.

Once you have implemented ACAP on your website, please add the “ACAP enabled” logo to your home page and other pages on your site. Go to: Add an