March 10, 2008
Exact Seek - Beware
About 1-2 times a month, Jayde Online, publishers of the popular Site Pro News and owners of Exact Seek push rather hard their service, and a few fall for it as they make some pretty good claims:
- Flat Fee
- Featured Listing
- Low Cost ($3-4 a month)
- Top Ten Exposure
- World Wide Placement
The problem is, they don’t really spell out where that placement will be, and the site has been hammered in the last few Google PageRank updates, falling all the way down to a PR3, which is below average quality for a site, and really low for a directory.
I even did some testing on dozens of sites. The result? A trickle of traffic and no conversions. And I’m not talking about just sales here, I had no REAL signups for free newsletters or free offers. Oh sure I had lots from automated bots, but those were flushed with my captcha verification.
My advice is spend your time and money somewhere else. This isn’t a good place to be.
Filed under SEM/SEO, Webmaster by Jerry West











Comments on Exact Seek - Beware »
thank you.just like i thought.they make a good claim but that sound too good to be true.
I knew it. I thought that was too good of a price for what they were offering. Glad you posted this, thanks.
I’m glad I came across this. Now I need to know what to use that’s resonable in price with result?
Quick-Tech Computer Services, LLC
Great Thks for the info. Nearly think of signing up with them.
http://www.minigolfsite.com
oh thanks i was going to submit my site to their top 10 exposure,but i changed my mind.
Thanks for the input. I have subscribed for similar offers in the past and got no response. It’s cheap but if it doesn’t work, why throw money out the window? I appreciate the insight. JM
Thanks for the advice. I nearly subscribed to their service.
Thanks for the post. I was doing research to see if they were legit when I found your site.
Sincerely,
Christopher Arnell
http://www.eldoradoseo.com
Ok thanks, as said my friend Erick if something sound too good to be true is because its not true, just simple like that!
sounded to good to be true in the first place. I mean who could be so lame to go for their “get into the top ten for a few bugs in a few days ” proposal anyway… top ten is hard work, never ending hard work as competitors do not sleep. And most important hard work form the beginning. We had a lot of programmers and high profile companys programming our shop who did not have the slightest idea of SEO. They thought good shopsoftware will do the job.But that certainly isn’t enough by any means. There are a lot of guys out there that promise you a lot of traffic for a few dollars. Just BEWARE!
Good post. Do you still think it would be worthwhile to sign up to them just to get the backlinks from the 100s of seach engines they claim to put your advertisment on?
http://www.justaboutitall.com
These comments are patently ridiculous. It never fails to amaze me how some buyers will waste hours researching a $4/month deal and not blink an eye when throwing money at Google Adwords where you are lucky to get any clicks unless you pay $4+/click. ExactSeek doesn’t claim to provide Google-type results for $4/month. ExactSeek and the ISEDN provide a low cost alternative to Google & Yahoo. What you can expect is a steady trickle of clicks from a large number of smaller engines & directories. It’s a supplemental advertising strategy, not a replacement for PPC advertising or SEO efforts. The program wasn’t setup for Fortune 500 cos.
Even if an advertiser only received 25 clicks a month - at $4/mo. this would be a steal in comparison to Google where it’s virtually impossible to setup a meaningful campaign for less than $25/day. But for all the naysayers out there, feel free to try.
As for the Pagerank drop, almost all directories have taken a pagerank hit. Not sure what the current Google line is, but the last BS explanation had to do with directories messing with Google’s link popularity calculation.
Jeremy,
No. I don’t feel it is worthwhile. The reason you advertise is to generate leads and/or make sales. According to our testing Exact Seek has generated zero real leads or sales across the large portfolio we have. Our members of the SEO Revolution have reported the same findings - zero ROI.
MS,
Posting a comment for ExactSeek with a free Yahoo! email account is rather suspicious. I thought Jayde was located in Virginia, yet your IP address is in the Atlanta area.
It was never stated here that ExactSeek was looking to be an AdWords replacement - those are the words from your ads, not our comments. The issue remains, the fee could be 50 cents a month and it would still be a rip-off because the traffic that is delivered isn’t real. If it was, it would convert with a free offer.
We run tests all the time, and all the other networks have at least a couple of conversions … and consistently, your service has zero.
The facts are clear: Your service is the one that is, to use your words, “patently ridiculous.”
If your IP sleuthing and location detection are as accurate as your ad analysis, I think that speaks for itself. Put that brain power to work in detecting the massive fraud that goes on in most PPC networks, including Google’s. Every sign up to the ExactSeek program gets $90 in giveaways. Even if every click was fraudulent which is far from the case, 99% of the buyers would still be receiving a bargain. I’ve spent thousands on Google Adwords and received zero return so I could make the same case against them as you do against ExactSeek. My advice - stick with Google - you deserve a monopoly.
I signed up and canceled shortly after. The site doesn’t have any traffic except for people who want to submit their site. This service sucks and is a scam. Don’t sign up. You’ll be charged on a subscription basis too. You wont even know you are being charged.
Thanks for this article I was just thinking to try that offer.
More thanks from me too - was looking into it and glad I found this article. Even now in Jan 2009 it’s still a PR3
Hi,
I have been reading this post with interest. I am promoting my swimming pool website and have been using exactseek, as well as Adwords. I am receiving the traffic expected for my budget, but it seems (from my statistics) people open the page and go elsewhere, my content is valid and should be holding visitors. Am I seeing this because it is not real visitors, but robots or similar?
If ExactSeek and Google are so bad, where does one suggest we spend our advertising budgets to get best return?
Are there any acceptable places to buy links from?
Saved some money And hope they get something going
that will direct traffic in the future?
Iwas searching for the info. as i was about to sign up with them today thank you.
Thanks for the post…I have also thought about using these people…great advise…
Bottom line is …
… if someone is pushing so hard as EXACTSEEK, they must have a reason for. It wouldn’t need a doctorate to figure out their needs for push -
My advice is do really good SEO and you won’t have much need for PPC. We did it for one of our page and after 3 weeks we now claim an alternate position within the top 20. Good SEO is still the best marketing tool!
I agree with you Mitch that SEO is a great marketing tool, but you need to test FIRST with PPC to see which keywords convert to your offer and then do SEO for those terms.
I couldn’t help but respond to these post’s
I was going to try exact also but had a change of mind reading your posts.
I have set up some free payperclick links on my site.
only a few, but they worked for me. and one of the payperclick sites gives you $20 bucks for free, without deposit.
I was able to get 2 customers from them…thought you guys might wanna try it.
http://www.gamebeard.com/Page5.html
The fact that there is no a phone number to contact somebody there and ask some question, speaks for itself.
Very interesting topic here relating to the so called smaller search engines.
The biggest of them all, Kanoodle…is notorious for this type of scam…their robots are well known to send fake traffic to websites…still people spend their hard earned offline dollars to purchase clicks…
Glad I came across this forum, I was about to whip out my card and, being a frugal kinda guy, I did a google search on the domain exactseek, and presto, the second result was about this scam!
tsk, tsk, run Forrest……..
I wish I had read this before I purchased the listing from exactseek. I am not even getting traffic from them - you cannot really call 1 visitor/week a traffic.
Thanks every one I like a lot of other people here were about to give them a go
We just got ripped by Traffic circuit the same way so we have been looking for a allternative to the skam artists as well I will book mark this site and keep checking in
Thanks once again
Hell, I’d pay that just to get links google wouldn’t torpedo me over.
Some time back I had an `adwords box` on the ISEDN ( Exactseek )thnking that over 200 site links would make a difference to my traffic, It made no difference what so ever. One thing that I found odd was that NONE of these sites showed up on searches for the site I had added.