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
- AdWords Replacement
Yes, you read that right, they advertise as a Google AdWords replacement. 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. And unlike AdWords where you can actually GET traffic, the same can’t be said when you use ExactSeek’s service.
How do I know? I tested it.
I tested 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 of “traffic” 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.
Tags: exact seek, jayde online, sitepro news, website traffic
The main reason I started the SEO Revolution was out of frustration. Frustration at all of the lies and misconceptions that are posted in forums, given as advice in teleconferences, and even taught in live workshops. "So why didn't all of this work?" " Why wasn't my site successful?" " Why am I still stuck in a rut?" 
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.
I am glad we did not give this a try. So you are saying the back links are no help as well?
I tried an ExactSeek featured listing. It’s $12 per keyword for 3 months. Since my site profiles a lot of, er, notorious political/religious figures I used their keyword compare tool and chose ‘wikipedia’ for my word. The results have been interesting.. to say the least. I went to several of their directory affiliates and sure enough.. my ad was there. However, I’m in the US but about 2/3 (at least) of my traffic came from central and so america. I got about a 100 to 200 hits a day but maybe 3-5% actually looked beyond the front page. Okay, now for the really hilarious part. I don’t think they’ve done a dang thing to improve my rank in any way that really matters, but according to Alexa my blog is now the #140,000 and something top site in Mexico! LOL
I was looking into signing up and decided that maybe I should check it out better first, Thanks
I was looking into this too. I have just paid ÂŁ90 +VAT for adwords – 6 key phrases for a month with Lavoramarketing.com in my local area – we are builders so have a very small geographical area, fortunately. I got 700 genuine clicks onto my site and a couple of real customers so I was squids in. But in the meantime I entered my site on the top 10 free online directories and wrote a couple of Blogs. This has kept me on page 1 of Google and in the top 10 of Googlemaps. I stopped the ads -don’t need them – but may consider it again to give us a blast – maybe every 4 months or so. SEO is hard work and there is no cheap alternative to all that typing which I did at night after work.
had my credit card sitting on my keyboard, thanks for saving me a few $
had my credit card sitting on my keyboard, thanks for saving me a few $;. All the best!!
Thanks just posted free listings was going to sign up but i’ll give it a miss after reading this
thank you
andy
Thank you for your clarification.. it seemed to me as a scam but you know one have to be sure of that
.
Why would you call it a scam? they are not…take it or leave is business..there are other hundreds of them all..i think exactseek lists ur site well across the mentioned engines…so where is the problem?
The reason it is a scam Aby is they advertise as a Google AdWords alternative, but the majority of the traffic you get is from automated bots. I fully tested this and there is NO quality traffic that comes from this service.
Has anyone had any luck with this. I mean for $12 bucks a month its gotta do some good?
thanks …. not going to sign it up
The site as mentioned previously, charges a monthly fee of $19.95
Seems like its not allot to risk.
My question is does anyone know who actually uses these Indy Directories?
I fell for one “scam” and the only people on there were others who opted in for the “scam”.
I am not saying This Program is a scam but knowing the demographics is helpful.
Shmark
http://www.mingamo.com
Exactseek is cheap compared to just about everything but organic seo and hand submitting to search engines and directories. The Jayde search engine is always worth the free submit as is the Exactseek directory even if it takes over a year to get listed free. So is ScrubtheWeb and SightSearch free submit. The adwords varient results is largely dependent on the type of traffic their second and third rate search engines and directories get versus your choice of keyword and ad copy. I do NOT believe you get backlink credit for these ads. There is another company that resells the Exactseek ads for the same price for one month, I forget their name, well worth avoiding that deal. It is worth doing some keyword research and trying different ad descriptions over the 12 weeks you get for $12 dollars. For example, should you say “online store” or does that scare people off or does not saying “online store” cause people to click away when they find out it’s a store. I think it’s worth the $12 if you do a little work.
Has anyone had any luck with this? At $12 bucks a month and for all the backlinks? We have seen our site do real well from many backlinks.
Now I know why the girl on their homepage is smiling!!!!
The problem is that if the site loses ranking with Google yot only lose some of the value but if Google thinks that the directory is a scam then it might think that you are trying to use unwanted methods and they might drop your ranking. So beware.