Singles.com has relaunched as an objective dating site review resource. The site competes with longtime dating site review sites link edatereview (good), datingsitereviews (good) and many other not-so-good sites.
We have an internal team of experienced inhouse dating site reviewers with over 25 years of combined online dating experience. Each one of those team members does an independent review of the site in question. Once completed, the team sits down and comes up with a consensus review. In most cases, they tend to come up with the same basic review. Because each person has their own likes and dislikes, our reviewers are told to ignore the content of the site and simply look at the facts: number of members, quality of profiles, value for money, customer service quality, and an overall review of the site.
Behold the statement: “Because each person has their own likes and dislikes, our reviewers are told to ignore the content of the site.” Huh?
They say they are able to get special deals from most dating sites, is this true? Some of the prices I saw were from months ago.
As more and more dating sites launch affiliate programs, the lines between useful reviews and poorly written affiliate marketing come-ons continues to blur.
Most sites copy content from other review sites, often with the same spelling and grammar mistakes. Worse are the sites full of stale reviews from 2004.
Singles.com is at it’s core an affiliate site. They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, its’ all about making $20 when you sign up for a dating site after reading about it on theirs. Singles.com will get some traffic simply due to it’s name. There is absolutely nothing wrong with paid affiliate listings, I just find them on average poorly executed, stale and more of an SEO game than about helping singles make informed decisions about which dating sites to join. As with all review sites, Caveat emptor.
The review business is woefully underserved and I’m thinking about doing something about it. I have removed the affiliate links from my sidebars and will be moving them to another page or url entirely in the near future.
