How rankings, data, and sponsorships work

Where listing information comes from

Listing details come from shop websites, owner updates, and other public sources. When source links are available, they appear on the shop page alongside the date the information was last checked. These sources describe where the facts came from; they are not a rating, review, or endorsement of the shop.

Potential shops found through bulk data or community suggestions enter a review queue first. Records that lack enough useful detail stay out of city pages, search results, the map, and our sitemaps. A competing directory may help us discover a shop, but it does not control what CardShopMap publishes.

When a listing is complete enough to be useful

Each listing is scored on six facts. Address and a map location are required outright — without them we cannot send anyone anywhere, so the record is not counted at all. A listing is treated as complete at 60%, which is what you get with an address, a map location, and at least one of a phone number, a website, or opening hours.

How a city goes live

A city page is only worth publishing if it beats a plain search for the same thing. So a city goes live when both of these are true:

• At least 2 listed shops in the city. One shop is a shop page, not a city page — we send that traffic to the shop’s own profile instead.
• At least 50% of them complete (and never fewer than 1). A page can hit a shop count and still read as filler if most entries are just names.

There is one narrow alternative: a claimed notable shop, plus a confirmed upcoming event, plus genuinely unique factual content about the market. An editor can also publish a city on demonstrated search demand. Neither route skips the completeness requirement.

A city that has listed shops but has not cleared the gate stays reachable — you can still see the shops we have — but the page is marked noindex and is left out of our sitemaps, so it cannot become search-engine clutter. A city with nothing publishable in it returns a 404 rather than an empty “card shops in…” page.

How a state goes live

A state publishes at 3 listed shops, or at 1 listed shop plus a confirmed upcoming event. All 50 states and DC always have a reachable page so you can follow coverage, but a state below the bar is noindex.

A state can be live while none of its cities are — three listed shops spread across three different towns makes a useful statewide list and three thin city pages. In that case we publish the state list and keep the city pages out of the index.

When a shop profile is indexed

A shop profile is indexed once it has a clear name, a complete address, at least one contact method, a stable map location, core category or service facts (or an owner claim), and no unresolved duplicate or closure conflict.

Organic ranking

Published and operational shops first, then query relevance, then distance when there is a search point, then listing completeness and freshness, then a deterministic name tie-break. Lists are paginated at 24 results so the order is stable and reproducible.

Paid inventory renders in dedicated, labeled slots. It is never an organic ranking signal, and paying us cannot move a shop up the organic list. No more than one paid unit appears before the first organic result, and no more than one per six organic cards.

Data source priority

Owner claims and official shop websites outrank licensed business data, official manufacturer locators, public directories, and community tips, in that order. An automated source can never overwrite a shop owner’s confirmed update — it opens a conflict for review instead. Accuracy is free forever: claiming a listing or sending a correction costs nothing and is never behind a plan.

Who writes the guides

MarkTheCoderShark is the named editor for CardShopMap's hobby guides. The role applies the site's published methodology, listing data standards, source-priority rules, and correction process; it does not claim personal collecting, retail, grading, appraisal, or event experience.

The byline identifies one consistent editorial voice; it is not a claim of professional hobby credentials. Claims that depend on a grading scale, product configuration, or other external standard link to the primary publisher. Readers can review the guide, follow those sources, and send a correction when the published record needs to change.

Crawler identity

Our importer identifies itself as CardShopMapBot/1.0 (+https://cardshopmap.com/methodology/). It honours robots.txt, rate limits itself to one request per second per host, and stores source URLs for provenance only.