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Search & Social Sharing

Every public page on Sailboat Racing is built to be found by search engines and to look good when shared on social media — so your club's results help bring people to your site.

Search engine optimisation

Each public page automatically includes the metadata search engines rely on:

  • Descriptive titles and descriptions - unique to each page (club, series, race, sailor, class, boat).
  • Canonical URLs - tell search engines the preferred address for a page, avoiding duplicate-content penalties when filters are applied.
  • Structured data (schema.org) - machine-readable markup so results can appear as rich results in search:
    • Clubs are marked up as a SportsOrganization (including address and location when set).
    • Series, divisions, and races are marked up as SportsEvent — tagged as the sport "Sailing", and including the club as the event venue (Place) when the club has an address or map location set.
    • Sailor profiles are marked up as a Person.
    • Listings (clubs, series, sailors, classes, boats) include ItemList and BreadcrumbList data.
  • Descriptive image alt text - cover photos and homepage screenshots carry alt text, helping image search and screen-reader accessibility.

How year and category filters are indexed

Result pages can be filtered by year and category. To keep search results clean:

  • Past years are indexed individually - e.g. last season's series results remain discoverable at their own address (?year=2024).
  • The current year uses the clean address - no ?year= is added, since it is the default view.
  • Category filters are not indexed separately - they always point search engines back to the unfiltered page.
  • Empty filtered views are not indexed - if a year or category filter matches no results, that page is marked noindex so search engines don't index a blank view. A sailor, class, or boat page visited at its plain address with no activity this season instead shows its all-time record (clearly labelled as all-time totals), so the page stays useful and indexable.

Social sharing previews

When a page is shared on platforms like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, or WhatsApp, it shows a rich preview card (Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata):

  • Title and description matching the page.
  • Preview image - your club's cover photo is used on club-related pages. Pages without a cover (and the homepage) use a branded Sailboat Racing image.

!!! note "Cover image format" Club cover images are served in modern WebP format. Facebook and X render these previews correctly; LinkedIn may not always show the cover image. The branded fallback image always displays.

Sitemap and robots

  • A sitemap at https://sailboat.racing/sitemap.xml lists every public page — each club and all of its series, races, sailors, classes, and boats — so search engines can discover them. It is organised as a sitemap index with one main child sitemap plus one child sitemap per club. The main sitemap covers the site-wide pages (home, club directory, map, features, about, and privacy policy) and every club's home page; the per-club sitemaps carry that club's deeper pages. Race and series entries carry a lastmod date (the race date, or a series' most recent race) so search engines can prioritise re-crawling pages that have changed.
  • robots.txt at https://sailboat.racing/robots.txt welcomes search engines and points them at the sitemap. The embeddable TV widgets are excluded from indexing, since they are display tools rather than destinations.
  • llms.txt at https://sailboat.racing/llms.txt is a short, plain-text map of the site (in the emerging llmstxt.org convention) aimed at AI tools rather than search engines. It lists only the top-level entry points — home, club directory, map, features, about, privacy policy, and the Resources guides — so a tool reading it gets a clean overview without crawling. The deep per-club, per-sailor, and per-series pages are left to the sitemap, which keeps this file small and always current.

You don't need to configure any of this — it is generated automatically from your club's data.

Page not found (404)

If someone follows a broken or out-of-date link — an address that doesn't exist, or one pointing at a club, series, race, or sailor that has been removed — they see a friendly Page not found page inside the normal site layout, complete with the site header, footer, and navigation, rather than a blank error. It offers two ways to carry on: Register your club and Browse active clubs. The page returns the correct 404 status and is marked noindex so search engines don't index dead addresses.