Now, most of you are probably assuming that what all of that means is that I'm better at spamming than my competitors. That is not the case. Magic-City does not Spam. We don't cloak, use hidden text, steal other people's pages, or use any one of dozens of other little tricks, to try to fool the Search Engines. What we do is simply provide the Search Engines and Directories with highly relevant information about specific keywords. The problem is the information has to be formatted to fit each engines algorithm to get placed in the top of the results, which invariably forces you to reduce the quality of the content. The whole procedure is contradictory.

The Problem With Search Engines

Search Engines are a database that store information, (websites) and then use a program called a spider, to retrieve what it "thinks" is relevant information to a specific query or keyword. Typically, the spider uses a point system or algorithm to find that information. The problem is that no program can identify quality, it can only identify specific things like title tags, meta tags, keyword density and things like that. It then gives each of those specific things a value and returns results based on that.

Now, everyone wants to be in the top, so people like myself come along and spend whatever time and or money it takes to figure out these little point systems until we know that this "engine" gives 10 points for the title, that "engine" gives 20 points for keyword density, this one gives points for link titles and so on, until we know how to write a page to get 100 points and get our pages on top.

The problem is that because of this system, in order to get top placement, which of course generates traffic our focus is placed on hitting this point system and NOT on providing quality web sites. I'm not saying that there are no quality sites in the top results of search engines, I'm just saying that the very best page in the world will not come up in the top of the results if it does not meet the criteria of that spider's point system. This has brought us all to the point that now all the major search engines are flooded with millions of short, ugly, crappy doorway pages in the top of the results for virtually every possible keyword or phrase. This makes finding relevant information from a major engine very difficult.

The real irony of this whole little fiasco is that all the major engines claim to hate Spam. They penalize or ban sites at will for breaking their vague and hard-to-understand "rules". So they set up these spiders to play this little game, BUT, if you play the game, you get busted. The engines need web masters to provide content and the content on top of the results is only there because that web master played the game better than his competitors, so the engines constantly change their point systems to stop those nasty spammers when in fact, the engines are only forcing everybody to play this little game even harder. They are forcing people to become the exact thing they claim to not want!

To me, it's a little silly.

The Problem With Directories

Directories work differently than search engines in the way they index, or include, data and how they determine relevance and placement. Directories use human reviews, or editors, to do the job of the spiders. A human will look at a site and determine the quality and relevance opposed to letting a program do it for them. There are two obvious problems with this system.

1. TIME:  Yahoo is the most popular directory on the net, yet they are also one of the smallest. Yahoo is notorious for not getting your submission listed. Not because of your site being of poor quality, but simply because their staff had far more submissions than they had time to review. This means that the vast majority of sites on the net never get a chance to be seen on Yahoo simply because no one had time to look at it.

   Now, a long comes alternatives like about.com and The Open Directory Project. Both of these services work very much the same way as Yahoo, however, they use hundred and even thousands of editors. While this does, at least in theory, take care of the time issue, it now brings us to the second problem with directories.

2. HUMAN INTERVENTION:  Any human reviewed directory relies solely on the judgement of the person who has been give the powers of editor. Now the quality and relevance of your web site is in the hands of a person who knows nothing about you, your business, or your purpose other than what they see in a few minutes of looking at your web site. While most editors have some criteria that they are supposed to follow. That criteria is very broad and vague. Basically, your chances of getting traffic from this directory falls into the hands of someone else.

The final outcome of this process is that when a person does a search for a keyword, the results returned are only the results that the editor thought was relevant which may or may not be what the searcher would think was relevant. while I think that human reviewed directories do a far better job of giving the public relevant answers to search queries, it does very little for the web site owner and limits the options available to the public.

SearchKing's Answer
To These Problems

Our answer is simple. To find people who have an interest in a specific topic and supply them with everything they need to build a community ABOUT that topic.

We believe that if a person is looking for lets say accounting software, they are much more likely to find what they are looking for at accounting.searchking.com than by going to a major engine and digging for what they want. Now add a chat room, a forum, personalized e-mail, a classified ad section, etc. and now you have a very powerful tool built around and for accounting.

Take this concept and multiply it by hundreds even thousands of topics and you've built one great little search-portal service.