Please enter one URL that you think should be accessable from SkateSearch. If you'd like to nominate a whole site, please specify the home page of that site. There is a comment field below where you can make any clarifications and comments. I suggest mentioning how to contact the owner of a site for example... or indicate when or how often a page/site is updated.

URL:
Site email address:
Your comments:

"Your Comments"

If you intend to nominate a site, not just an issolated page, but that site has a several pages that are not skating oriented, please indicate how the search engine or a semi-intelligent human might be able to quickly recognize which pages are pertain to skating, and which do not.

For example, you could indicate that all pages within one hop of the specified page are skating oriented. In fact, you could create a private page whose sole purpose is to direct SkateSearch to those pages that are skating related. That page would contain no text except for link tags. That's just an idea.

 

"Site email address"

The email address field above is optional, but recommended. We will use that address to contact someone if the website seems to have a problem or can be improved. For example, if we find a site has broken links, we know who to contact. We might also use the email address it if we can't list a site/page the way the submitter intended. Finally we may contact you shortly after we list your site so that you can check if our search engine is correctly listing your page/site. (You can help us find our bugs... and improve the visibility of your site.)

We may also occasionally send out news to everyone if we are making a change that will affect many listings or need everyone's help improving the value we all bring to the skating community.

We will definitely not sell or share the email addresses that we have. Not even for noble causes.

 

Policy

We are a new site and really haven't tested any policies yet, so any policies that we might mention are subject to change. All policies that we do make are likely to be the result of our intent to provide value to the skating community or the result of maximizing the use of our limited resources. It is our hope that we can all cooperate to provide value to the skating community.

We currently review all nominations by hand. If we receive a variety of nominations that all cover the same topic, we may choose to only list a handful of them. We will chose the one's that we think provide the most value to visitors. At times that may mean that a new nomination will knock out a site we already list. At this time it is our intent to notify anyone if we will not honor their nomination or if they have been knocked out by another site. Because of the competitive nature of the listing process, we recommend that you mention any special features or value a site or page provides when you make a nomination. You should also feel free to contact us to inform us of new or removed features on your site. You can do this by simply nominating your site/page again.

SkateSearch is a cooperative effort. Please don't spam your pages to improve their ranking on SkateSearch. We will remove sites/pages that do this. And we will be adding features to the site that will let visitors flag pages that seem to be listed too low or too high in their searches.

 

Commercial sites

At this point we are limiting our listing of commercial sites. When we list a commercial site, we will only tend to list their home page. That policy might be fudged if we take on sponsors. -- That being said, a company can get around this restriction by creating a non-commercial page/site that is largely of general interest to the skating community... but also happens to direct people to their commercial pages via links... or has a small section of the page that is also dedicated to their products. An example of this might be if an ice resurfacing company provides a page that outlines the anatomy of ice resurfacing equipment. Or if a rink manufacturer describes how a rink is constructed and maintained. Or a ventilation company provides information about carbon monoxide concentrations in rinks.

 

Crawling

We expect that our search engine will visit each of the listed pages about once each week. It does respect the robot exclusion protocol and in fact this can be a good way for website owners to limit our crawler to skating related pages.

At a later date, we expect to be adding facilities to allow you to prompt our crawler to recheck your page as soon as possible. This can be useful if you have just added timely information to a page or site.

If a page is inaccessable for a few weeks, we are likely to remove its listing from SkateSearch. If this happens, feel free to renominate your page.

 

Your site

Having listed a few sites, we recommend that you avoid some of the miskates that some earlier sites have made:

 
• Provide a descriptive and unique title on all your pages. Our search results list the title of the pages that were found. If all your pages have the same title, users can not distinguish the pages listed without visiting each of them. An example of this currently is the USFSA site. Nearly every pages has the same title. If you use the SkateSearch right now, you can appreciate the inconvenience this is to visitors. (We believe the USFSA is gradually working to fix this problem on their site.)

  If we find a site that does not title it's pages well, we may chose not to list them. This being said, we are sympathetic to how difficult it can sometimes be to title each page a large site. For this reason, if we find that this is a significant problem, we will work with everyone to come up with a way around this problem.
   

• Avoid using frames. For various reasons, most search engines will not list sites with frames. For similar reasons, we will tend to reject sites that use frames. An example of a site that uses frames is the CFSA site. We only list a small portion of their site.
   
• Be sure to tell us why you think your site/page is important. Depending on what you tell us, we can actually boost the listing of your site for a few keywords or phrases.
   
• If a portion of your site is dedicated to things other than skating, then PLEASE indicate how the search engine will be able to distinguish the skating related pages from the non-skating related pages. If you do not, we may end up only listing an easily recognizable subsection of your skating pages. Feel free to contact us if you want some ideas.

  BTW, an example of this is Don Korte's wonderful site. We only index a part of it because we haven't been able to reach him to coordinate a strategy that prevents us from picking up pages that are not related to skating. (If you know Don, have him contact us.)
   

• Be sure to add links from each of your pages to your site's main page. You should do this so that if someone jumps directly from SkateSearch to a page within your site, they will have an way to find all the other content on your site. This is especially important for commercial sites because we might not list your home page on SkateSearch.
   
• Stick to one topic per page. If you have a variety of topics to cover, keep each on a separate page. This will tend to raise the ranking of each page in the topic that it covers.
   
• Think about what words people are likely to search on to get to your page and be sure your page has those words. For example "pics" is a pretty chic way of saying "photos", but people are more likely to search on the word "photos" than "pics". Keep that in mind when selecting a title and content of your pages.
   
• As a service to the community use the SSCOMMENT tag to delimit areas of your pages that aren't really useful for the search engine to search on. This is especially imporant for large sites that might have a standard footer on all their pages that say the same thing. For example, the USFSA site currently has a standard footer on every page that includes the word "clubs". If anyone searched for "clubs" on SkateSearch, they'll see all the USFSA pages cluttering the bottom half of the result list. If the USFSA were to surround their headers and footers with <SSCOMMENT> and </SSCOMMENT>, this nuisance would be avoided. Note: these tags are not standard HTML, but they should not cause a problem for the current crop of browsers.

Mistakes

If you see any mistakes on this page, please let us know. :-)