I recently worked on a small fan-made guide site for an indie visual novel / horror game community, and I wanted to share a few practical notes from building it.

The project is not an official game site. It is a fan resource focused on helping players find walkthroughs, character pages, route notes, ending status, and safe links to the official game source.

The site is here: the freak circus QUIZ

Why build a fan guide site?

For niche games, players often search for very specific things:

• character names
• route guides
• ending explanations
• “is the next chapter out?”
• safe download / official play links
• quiz-style discovery pages

A single homepage is usually not enough. Search intent is fragmented, so the site structure needs to match how players actually search.

Site structure that worked

Instead of putting everything into blog posts, I separated pages by intent:

• /characters for cast and character discovery
• /walkthrough for route and chapter help
• /endings for ending-related questions
• /day-3 for release-status searches
• /quiz/which-character for interactive discovery
• /play and /download for safe source guidance

This keeps each page focused and avoids multiple pages competing for the same keyword.

SEO lessons from the project

1. Canonical rules matter for interactive pages

Quiz and result pages can create many URL variations. For example, a result page may have different match percentages or share-card URLs.

If every variation is indexable, Google may see too many near-duplicate pages.

The better approach is:

• index the stable result page
• canonicalize percentage or stage variants back to the main result page
• noindex highly personalized pages that depend on query parameters

2. Fan sites need clear source boundaries

For game content, I try to separate:

• official information
• player-reported notes
• fan interpretation
• unconfirmed speculation

This is especially important for walkthroughs and ending guides. If something is not confirmed in the current build, the page should say that clearly.

3. Internal links are more useful than more pages

For a small site, adding more pages is not always the answer.

The better win is often improving paths like:

• quiz result → character profile
• character profile → walkthrough
• walkthrough → endings
• Day status page → official source
• homepage → high-intent guide pages

This helps both users and search engines understand what the site is about.

Tech stack

The site is built with Next.js and uses static/dynamic routes for guide pages, character pages, quiz results, sitemap generation, and metadata.

The main technical SEO checks I keep an eye on are:

• canonical tags
• robots meta
• sitemap inclusion
• title length
• meta descriptions
• internal links
• structured data where appropriate

Final note

Small fan-made sites can still be useful if they are honest, well-structured, and clear about what is official versus fan-made.

The goal is not to replace the official game page, but to help players navigate the community knowledge around it.