Espotting/UKPlus

They've pipped GoTo

[makemetop]

Espotting results now appear on UK Plus as the first 5 sponsored listings (with your logo shown if you have the #1 position). As this might actually bring some traffic I logged in to my (still free) Espotting account to up my listings - they have a new facility called Make Me Top to put you top of the searches - nothing like a bit of viral marketing! Now MakeMeTop is my registered trademark, I wonder if I could get a freebie out of them? Or if it is worth the effort!

[tigger]

so you now surf on freeserve that will cost your client per click and then use alternative search with UKplus for the same term and have to pay yet agian.

I wonder how many people will pay for both rankings in both SE's and effectively double the search cost.

[Videoman]

......and on the subject of UKPlus, I see they now splash a search banner across the top of all click thru's.
Has anyone had any success in getting UKPlus to change the KW's they use to search on. The results I have been getting from them have been pretty naff....could do with a KW refresh....or give up:(

[mr_dredd]

so is espotting worth paying for some keywords on? whats the general consensus??

[oldtimer]

I haven't used them yet but from Makemetop's last comment in [webmasterworld.com...]
it doesn't sound like it.

[tigger]

on the grounds that you don't know what's it like until you've tried it, I've just paid £25 to them for some bid's. the keywords are the same as goto so it will be interesting to see how they compare.

certainly the submission process is better, you don't get the annoying time out errors and you can submit your bid by e-mail rather than completing an on-line form

[makemetop]

Tigger, watch the spurious click throughs due to very poor matching to the questions on Ask UK. They are draining my account! I'm calling them tomorrow to get them to do something - there is no way I am putting clients on Espotting while this is going on. I've just typed in to Ask 'how do i get good search engine listings' and got choices on estate agents from espotting matching up to the word listings. I assume that this is an espotting problem (but it doesn't happen all the time) rather than an Ask UK, because I've never seen it happen with GoTo.

Edited by: makemetop

[tigger]

thanks for the tip, I would be very interested to hear what they tell you

[makemetop]

I'll post the reply - I don't think this is deliberate - just sloppy coding and hope they get it sorted! I was about to put some clients on for the UKPlus listings but am now getting a lot of hits from Ask for totally off subject searches (over 50 yesterday or £6.00 worth).

[tigger]

one thing you could also mention to them, under a search using keyword "loft conversions" all the paid listing are estate agents, now obviously I understand the logic behind this, loft conversions = houses but I don't think this is particularly relevent to estate agents

It's going to interesting to see what there Editorial
staff think to my own submission and should this get rejected I will direct to some of there current search results

[makemetop]

OK, spoke to Espotting and they acknowledged the problem and have taken down the phrase 'mis'matching this morning. It now all appears to work as it should - and a refund to my account. They put up a new algo on Thursday which obviously was designed to strip out the question part of Ask's queries but obviously didn't quite work!

[tonysamios]

As Client Service Manager at Espotting.com I feel it my duty to answer some of the concerns which have been raised in this forum . Espotting.com always endeavours to maintain the highest standard of relevancy and the displaying of results with the aim of increasing the delivery of qualified web users to our client base . To do this we have used various techniques of matching phrases to the Espotting.com database with particular reference to our meta search network. While these results were favourable , i.e we displayed more results,we have now decided to revert to a previous version of the phrase matcher which better matches our rigourous standard of relevance more effectively.

If anyone has any particular questions they wish to be addressed , please feel free to contact me directly at [e-mail]

[tigger]

thanks for dropping in tony and welcome to the forum, I'm still waiting to hear from your editorial staff, any idea on your current turn around time from submission to inc within the database