Where is zoosk.com now?

A little more than 4 years ago Zoosk.com was making headline news all over the internet and even on TV, but recently, the name doesn’t ring a bell as much as it did before. Some of our readers have reported that the site is full of spammers and is not what it was made out to be. It would be great to get some more feedback from our readers on this once wondrous online dating site that has been making waves and becoming a rising star.

We here at Jumpdates did do a complete review of this dating site and you can read it here..

Zoosk.com - Review by Jumpdates

One of the ways to find out about a dating site is to simply type the site into the Google search box. I did a search for ‘Zoosk.com reviews’ and came back with the first site called ’sitejabber.com’. Funnily enough this site gave a rating of 2.8 out of 5.0 for the zoosk.com site as did we, which may tell us something about the quality of ratings, but you can decide. I did read some of the top comments and some were not very good as they refer to the site as scammers and have been setup to extract money. Although one should take all the comments with a pinch of salt, there is no denying that website has been losing significant traffic over time as the diagram shows below (taken from a reputable web analytics site - compete.com).

compete graph of zoosk traffic data over 2014 to 2015

All time traffic to Zoosk.com does appear very dismal and could be an indication that the site is not as rosy as it was then. For my 2 cents, it could be another internet star that is biting the dust, keep in mind that we always hear of high fliers but little news given to struggling and potential upcoming stars. I guess we all like to be optimistic about the future which makes us more impetuous to try harder, but one should always be presented with a balanced picture so that there is semblance to the many who try and fail and to the very few that do succeed.

Tags: zoosk, zoosk failure, zoosk success, zoosk traffic, zoosk.com

People are getting married at a later life and the marriage rate from year to year is on the decline. The statistics for US is that marriage has declined by as much as 50% since 1970. Check out these figures from this site…

http://www.foryourmarriage.org/factsfigures/

Since many folks are looking for their marriage partners through online dating sites, it would be interesting to note whether marriages through dating sites have stood the test of time over let’s say marriages from traditional methods ie. referrals from friends, families, work, meeting in events, clubs etc. One can argue that the choice of ‘potential marriage’ partners are far greater in an online dating community and hence a greater chance of success, right. Unfortunately, the top dating sites do not boast the sustainability of the many ‘marriages’ that they have been instrumental in but like to quote the huge marriage figures to lure in more members. Should one not analyze the effectiveness of the marriage sustainability from their websites and thus provide more insight to single members and give them this valuable advice and guidance. I think since marriages are occurring in such great numbers from online dating sites, they have a duty to at least study the figures of success and failures of people who got married on their sites. However, the ‘chemistry’ of a successful marriage cannot be determined by profile information alone and even in courting over 6 months to a year.

It would seem that stars need to be aligned along with all our personality traits combined with an understanding of what is yet to come for marriages to be successful. I am not trying to be a naysayer but the point being that there are no perfect solutions to a successful marriage, and if anyone tells me that they have the secret formula, I would not believe them. You could argue that being with someone for a certain amount of time could be the answer to longevity but then I would argue that arranged marriages have led to longer marriages. Then the question of cultures come into play and people’s perception of roles within the marriage, so on so on. Why are there so many marriage failures today even in the first few years and yet not so long ago marriages were going past the 30 years mark. Perhaps one should go about compiling all the divorce proceedings that are going on right now in the courts today in order to get a better idea and share this knowledge with everyone. I am not trying to put marriage down but I would like to have some answers as to what makes a good marriage and what doesn’t. Has society changed so much so that it is not possible for two people to have a long communion even if they wanted it so.

Marriage success and failures - what should we know

In my personal opinion, although the ‘chemistry’ needs to be there, there are many factors that bear the fruits of a successful marriage, but you may have a different opinion. Listed below are my order of importance on factors that could make up a good marriage:

• Common background - This implies that you have similar interests and even if you don’t, your other partner appreciates those indifferences
• Financial situation - We know that this can be a reason for many couples to separate. It’s a good idea to discuss your financial goals and interests to see that you are both on the same page. This leads to discussions on career aspirations and peering into the future which is important to marriage
• Personality - This is a difficult one and many can overlook this at their own peril. You really need to know what your other partner is all about, are they lazy, helpful, appreciative, condescending, moody, optimistic, honest, strong character, manipulative, introverted, talkative, attention seeker, ambitious, spiritual, sensitive, likeable, depressive, realistic, unrealistic, hard-working, calculating, empathetic, stubbornness, anxious, meek, religious, humble, smart, hygienic etc, etc.

Phew! The last one was fully loaded (and it’s not even a full list!) and is probably the many reasons why people break-up. There are personality traits that some may be able to work with but for others it’s a no-go area and you need to figure this out long before marriage. Okay, we can work out financial struggles if both are willing to work at it. Notice also that I have placed ‘Common background’ at the top, although I don’t say much about this, it really signifies people’s values and the inner qualities that lead up to all the personality qualities listed in the third point.

Tags: marriage, marriage failures, marriage success, online marriages, personality traits

Continuing on my previous article on how to find the best free date sites, I offer some insights on how the big brother Google actually goes about indexing dating websites. If you ever witnessed the dawn of the internet boom when Yahoo was King, you will see that the number of sites were far and few and lacked any useful data. At that time, it was just a way to get a presence online, let alone offer any quality content that users could make use of. Also the search engines were not that picky or sophisticated enough to really analyze a website and to provide relevant data to the search user. One could get to the top of the search engine for certain keywords by simply providing the keywords in the title and meta-tags!

Today, the standards of search engines and search results have changed tremendously and Matt Cutts of Google does an excellent job of presenting these evolutionary changes here in the following youtube video…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQI_0L_ggno

So, how does Google go about indexing dating sites?

Firstly, you have to remember that Google doesn’t define categories as we see it, this was done a long time back with Yahoo and AltaVista where websites were categorized according to specific primary categories such as Technology, Food, Economics etc. You don’t have to tell Google how to index your site in those categories, Google goes about indexing, categorizing by analyzing the website through inbound links, outgoing links, recurrence of keywords on the site and many other factors. Due to it’s heavy investment in building the algorithms that define it’s indexes, Google almost always invariably gets it right, hence occupies 85% of the world searches. At the end of the day, Google wants to provide the best service for the end user who are looking for relevant information to the searches they conduct.

When it comes to indexing dating sites, Google takes into many factors into account and only a handful of the important ones will be discussed here. Apart from the website which can provide pertinent information about it’s purpose, Google relies on ‘external’ factors that give more meaning and sense to the websites under consideration. After all, if it relied on just purely indexing the website, we would have a plethora of spammy websites in existence today who would all be vying for the top search positions to maximize traffic. These external factors I talked about earlier, include ‘referral’ websites that have some authority. For example, Google would give more weight to a CNN article reporting a ‘dating site’ in one of it’s post. However, it doesn’t quite end there, because CNN maybe reporting on scam dating websites and if Google simply went ahead and gave value to these sites it would be doing a gross injustice. These is where Googles’s algorithms (which are many) can get complex and evolves with time and have upset many webmasters and kept them on their toes.

The important thing to remember is that the days of simply tweaking and technically optimizing the site are not sufficient  to get you to rank higher although it does help by being more clear to search engine robots. What matters are quality content, authority in the domain space, quality referral sites linking back and the analysis of user activity on the site.

The other factors that one can intuitively guess are social factors. For example, if facebook users are talking about this free dating site and getting a lot of referrals then, naturally Google would want to put more weight to this. Google has been smart about the future of search by providing many tools to the webmaster such as Analytics, Webmasters, Trends and more. Not only has this benefited webmasters in optimizing their site for the search engine, it has allowed Google to monitor the performance of each of these websites which no doubt they can take into consideration in their indexing. For example, in Analytics, there is a figure for Bounce Rate and Session Time and these tell how a user interacts with the site once they have landed on them. If the bounce rate is high ie. they go through a single page and away from the site, then it could be considered low quality depending on what keywords they typed to get to it. If they remain on the site and visit several pages over a few minutes period, it maybe considered to be of value to the end user and as such Google will give this some weighting. One needs to understand that Google will only take aggregated values of user searches and not on single users alone because mass interest will be a better reflection of the overall relevancy and importance of the site.

Dating sites of today are very structured in it’s layout and functionality, it will usually have a sign-up page where users can register, conduct searches of other members on the site, read interesting articles or blogs about dating and relationships. No doubt, Google has already determined this as a criteria which it can use to determine relevant searches to send in it’s direction. Unfortunately, the competition for the keywords are very high as many dating sites vie for the top positions and only a few succeed. However, if sites cannot compete in the organic searches of Google, they have the option to ‘bid’ for those keywords and be placed at the top fold of the search or the column to the right. Hopefully, next time you go hunting for dating sites, you will be armed with a little bit more information as to what is happening behind the scenes.

Tags: dating sites index, evolution of search, google indexing, user searches

The internet landscape changes tremendously and many single folks are out there are still on the hunt for those free date sites. The problem is that as I have reported before, users just don’t have the time and energy to scrutinously look for these sites through the top search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. The only means to find those sites is to scan the first few pages of the search engines and take the best guess which site would work for them.

I am afraid to say that the returned results are not all that accurate as it includes a number of paid dating sites. However, help is at hand. Instead of going by the first set of results in the search, I suggest you examine the snippets and copy the dating site url to the site called hypestat.com. Here you will be returned with the most interesting set of results you can think of. You will then be able to do some initial research on the site before you make the long-winded decision of going through the arduous registration process and signing up.

The criterias that you should be interested include the following:

• Unique visitors - make sure that the site has a minimum number of unique visitors - 500 per day is a good figure
• Location site is hosted - this can tell you if the site is not tucked away in the corner of the internet world - check that they are located in major cities and towns that you are familiar with
• Alexa traffic rank - I would not put much weight on this as Alexa tries to cover the entire websites of the world and there is little meaning unless you have categories of websites sorted in groups
• Ad revenue/net worth - Just ignore

Hope this will allow you to filter the chaff from the wheat and give you more time to focus on the date sites that matter and allow you to end up finding your ideal date or partner.

hypestat site gives you pertinent info about a dating site

Tags: free date sites, free sites, help, help finding free sites

We tend to generalize and say that men are more left-sided brain and women are more right-sided brain. With left-sided brain being analytical, logical in it’s thinking while the right-sided brain is more creative, intuitive and expressive. However, recent studies in the field of psychology have shown that the brain is not so strictly divided as was previously assumed and that both are needed for the proper functioning of human beings be it male or female. You can learn more about this from the excellent article below..

http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/left-brain-right-brain.htm

I am actually very pleased to learn this actual piece of fact since it explains the phenomenal increase in my passion for the arts and other creative arts/science. As I have over the course of my career stayed true to my interests in science and technology, my interests in arts has always been there since I was a child. At one time, my arts teacher was very dismayed and talked to my parents about taking art courses for further studies. Naturally this was not to be and I set a path of high-tech and science which I must say was not a regrettable decision because I had tremendous interest in these areas. Recently, I have been bursting with creative interest in arts, psychology, cosmology, evolution and anything else that have tickled great minds over the centuries. But let’s not get too distracted from the main subject.

From my experience, I can safely say that there is no such thing as being too left-sided brain or too right-sided brain. It’s really a matter of the individual in which direction they want to go. I am a firm believer that no person is limited by it’s capacity to do anything it sets out to do. In other words, if you firmly believe in something and passionate about it, you can achieve your goals and desires. I am beginning to sound like a ‘be-positive’ guru but the sentence is fully loaded with true definition and meaning. I would encourage you to repeat the words again and then translate this to high-achievers you have met in your life. You will see that there is a direct correlation between the two.

I am the first to dismiss the person who brought out the notion of the left and right sided brain. This idea just caught on with the masses but the damage has been done. It has pigeon-holed people into distinct genders and placed arbitrary qualities that are distinct of the genders and from an early age biased people’s thinking that they meet some criteria. How sad, perhaps, if that wasn’t the case we would have a fusion of gender interaction like we have never witnessed before. For example, men being more expressive, doing housework, needlework etc and women fixing things around the house, holding high-powered positions etc. But then again we need to be sensitive to each others needs ie. men are physically stronger than women, they may not like chatting so much and interacting with people so much as some women do. The point I am trying to make is that there should not be any ‘differentiation’ of gender interests from an early age, we should encourage our children to be interested in anything that interests them as long as it does not endanger them.

I would love some feedback on this topic.

Tags: gender roles, human development, left side brain, right side brain