RPGSeek.com Homepage

RPGSeek.com has two primary components; the search engines and the link directory.  There are currently four search engines:

RPG Publishers: Official home pages of role-playing game publishers only.  No fan sites, blogs or Wikipedia! Note: wizards.com is not included in this engine. They have so much keyword “mojo” on Google they distort the results. Wizards.com is in the “4th Edition” search engine.

Role-Playing Bloggers: Active blogs related to role-playing. If you want an opinion, a review or a rant, this is the search engine for you! This includes every blogger from rpgbloggers.com

4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons: Sites related to the current release of this venerable game. Utility software,  quality fan sites and wizards.com comprise this category.

Everything Role-Playing: All of the engines above and any other quality role-playing sites. A catch-all search engine for a broad-based search.

FYI, once you complete a search, you can just click on the radio buttons and the system will automatically pull up the results for new selection.

The main problem with most custom search engines is that they are difficult to maintain.  There needs to be a method to add new sites to the index and manage the existing index of sites.    To that end, I added a link directory to RPGSeek.com.

RPGSeek.com Link Directory

The link directory  has  a complete submission system for sites and categories, as well as an automated way of checking that a site is still active.  When you submit a link to the directory, I verify the site is RPG related, approve it for the directory  and add it to the appropriate search engine. It also allows users to browse the links indexed in each search engine.

I also added the list of “Gen Con 2008″ and “Origins 2008″ vendor links to the RPGSeek.com directory.  The response to the vendor lists was amazing and I will compile them again for this year’s conventions.

RPGSeek.com is free to use and there is no fee to be listed in the directory.   I am doing this strictly to make it easier to find quality role-playing content on the internet. However, I cannot do it alone.  If you find a great site that the role-playing  community needs to know about, please submit it to the directory. Registration is not required to submit sites and categories!  Even more critical, if RPGSeek.com provides results that lead to a dead web site, please email us with the “Contact Us” form or your can use our direct email, visible after you follow the link below.

RPGSeek.com Email

Continual feedback from you, the role-playing community is the only way RPGSeek.com can succeed. If you would like further information, please read the site FAQ or drop us a line with the contact us page.

I do ask a small favor. If you like the site and find it useful, please submit RPGSeek.com to your favorite social networking site (digg/Furl/Slashdot/Mixx/Facebook etc. There is a button on the front page to do so).  The more people that use the site, the better the index will become!

Happy searching!

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

aka The Docent of RPGSeek.com

RPGSeek Dragon

Why bother, you ask?

Simple. Searching Google for information about role-playing games and their publishers is often frustrating. General keyword queries pull up fan sites, blogs, Wikipedia, Amazon, PDF sellers like rpgnow.com or some other irrelevant information.  Worse still, you search for a game company and the site has not been updated in 4 years or is completely dead.

Additionally, many publishers I looked at languished so far down the results that only the most dedicated searcher would ever find them. These publishers had no keyword optimization, poor quality incoming links  or other issues that drove them down the Google search results when competing against the entire Google index for ranking. They are, in search terms, small fish in an infinite pond.

To solve the problem, I moved the fish to a very small, finite glass tank.

Now, each and every search result through RPGSeek returns a link to an RPG publisher site. Clean, targeted searching without the irrelevant data for the questing gamer.  I hope you find it useful.

I know there are questions, so here is quick FAQ

0. Wizards of the Coast/wizards.com is not in the index!

A: This was intentional. The WOTC site contains so much high-ranked keyword content that it distorted the RPGSeek results and overwhelmed the smaller companies. Be patient. Did I mention the DNDSeek project I am working on…

1. Who is in the index of sites?

A: I am working on a list to post at a later date, but I would call it “comprehensive.”  For now, if you are curious if a site is in the index, just do a search for the exact website name, ie. www.crafty-games.com and see if it returns a homepage. If it does, then that site is in the index.

2. My beloved RPG publisher is not in the index! How do I get them in?

A: Go to the Livingdice.com contact form and let me know the site address. If it is a  RPG publisher then it will probably go in in a couple of working days. Non-publishers are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, but at this point I am leaning towards publishers of RPG games only.

3. How much does it cost to  submit a site.

A: Inclusion in the index is free.  Though I do sell advertising space on the site, so if you are in a spending mood…

4. Do you index the entire site or just the front page.

A: We utilize all content on the site from the base “www.domain.com” address that the Google content spider can see.

5. Will inclusion in RPGSeek’s index help my search ranking?

A: No. We are not linking to the sites, only searching them.

6. The search page is ugly.

A: I know. I am not the greatest web developer and will be improving it over the next few weeks.

Please use the contact form if you have any further questions.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer