<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 1

There were many differential factors that spurred the growth of these earlier sites and these included affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, forum boards and others.

Some were heavily influenced by the affiliate marketing programs that offered substantial payouts for each member that a webmaster can push from their website.

When a user clicked on that link, the ‘affiliate’ member would be registered with a click and a computer cookie will follow the user to the affiliated site where an affiliate member would be paid a certain portion of the sign up fee.

In some cases, the fee could be higher than the initial payout because the residual fee ie. subscription renewal fees could be lucrative to the dating site.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 3 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 2

It wasn’t that long ago when other companies were joining in this lucrative bandwagon of providing desperately needed traffic to these websites hungry for new members.

These websites were setup as purely link farms and offered traffic to the dating websites based on their excellent rankings in search engines.

The sites were popular only because of a ‘flaw’ in the search engine algorithms that ranked sites according to the number of links hosted on the site.

So for popular words such as ‘online dating’, these sites would have so many listed on their site that they would be consistently listed at the top of the search engine results.

Google knew that this was not the best set of results to present to their users as the sites were artificially inflated due to the many links hosted on the site.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 4 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 3

They naturally changed the algorithm and almost overnight the businesses of these companies went under.

No longer would these s sites be listed on top of the results page which meant a drastic drop in their traffic and hence their business.

The actual websites that got pushed to the top for those keywords were more accurate and relevant to users and consisted of the bigger companies such as match, eharmony, lavalife, date all appearing on the first page.

However, organic listings are the natural free-for-all listing that gets pushed into the results page and open to anyone to compete for ranking.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 5 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 4

The ultimate criteria for a search engine to produce relevant results to the user is based on the quality of the site and this is determined through its popularity, relevancy and the content.

In the same way that you would like to go to one store over another, the Google will rank your site according to what is considered relevant and high quality.

In other words, to get your site ranked to the top for specific keywords, there are no black hat techniques available today expect to produce a website that is world-class in content and user worthiness.

Long live the search engines.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 6 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 5

Search engine companies were making substantial money from a bidding war by companies trying to vie for those keywords.

At one time keywords such as ‘dating’ could reach as much as $7 per click for bids.

If you took this number and assuming that a conversion rate of 10% was feasible then the cost to the company to acquire one signed up member could be as much as $50 per member!

The bigger dating firms were scrambling to lure webmasters to their affiliate programs, because the cost to do business in this way was lower.

However, the affiliate program had some of its own issues in trying to retain loyalty of webmasters with its company and to ward off competition from other firms.

One time they flew down a UDate.com representative to meet with me when they realized that I had switched my affiliate program to another competitor.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 7 >>>