Folks. Here's how CitySearch rips you off...
Let's say you own a dress shop in Chicago and you only serve the Chicago market. You contact CitySearch and setup a listing/profile page for your shop to be listed on CitySearch's "Chicago" directory because that's the market you serve. You give them a budget and guess what, you quickly receive enough visitors to your profile page to max out your monthly budget! It doesn't seem to matter how high or low your budget, somehow you get enough clicks to max it out. How can this be? Gee golly how can your little dress business get so many hits? Especially when you don't see an increase in business on your end. No phone calls, no emails, no big jump in visitors to your own web site, virtually nothing.
The answer?... drum roll please ...
When you sign up for a listing for your "Chicago" business to be posted on their "Chicago" focused pages, you think that's all you get, right? Heck no. It turns out they also bury on their site dozens of additional links for your business. They post these buried links on pages that are devoted to other cities/markets. So, they list you in Chicago as expected. But they also place listings/links for your business on their pages for Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and Houston, and New York, and San Diego, and St. Louis, and so on. Each of these additional listings or links automatically "redirect" to your “Chicago” profile page when they are visited or "clicked" ... once clicked, presto! You are charged for the visit to your profile page. Remberber, CitySearch charges you when someone (or something) lands on your profile page, not on your own web site.
Now, these links are quite buried so no actual person will find them in a normal search. So who finds them? Search engine spiders do.
There are thousands of them out there that race around the web day and night. They follow every link they can find no matter how buried the link may be. These automated spiders are used by firms like Google, or Yahoo, or lesser known search engines to catalogue the entire web. Anyway, when you have dozens of links plastered all over CitySearch’s site you’re gonna get “hit” by these spiders and then get charged by CitySearch.
How can you verify what I'm saying? How can you tell if CitySearch has listed your firm on dozens of pages that have nothing to do with your geographic market? Simple. Do a Google search that contains two terms. 1) Your company name (it helps if your company name is fairly unique) and 2) the word CitySearch. What you’ll find are links to your paid listing in the city you chose, but also dozens of other listings in random cities around the country. Google may determine many of these listings are very similar and post the following text at the bottom of their search results list: “In order to show you the most relevant results, we (Google) have omitted some entries very similar to the (#) already displayed. If you like, you can (link starts here) repeat the search with the omitted results included.” Press that link and you’ll see all the additional links CitySearch has posted. Links that you did not request and that do not apply to your business’ geographic territory (assuming you are a small or mid-sized company with a regional focus). Press any of those additional CitySearch links, say the Atlanta link, and it will automatically forward to your Chicago profile page. Congratulations, you just charged youself for a visit!
In addition to the links on dozens of CitySearch City pages that are unrelated to your business market/geography, they give your info to “partners” who post links to your profile page on their web sites. Some of these will not be geography specific either. But CitySearch doesn’t care. What they want are as many links to your profile page as possible. More links means more clicks (even clicks by spiders). More clicks means they make more money. Simple as that.
Anyway, there’s a good reason why they create “profile” pages for you and charge you when the “profile” page is selected. I mean, wouldn’t it be better if they sent people directly to your website instead? After all, you’ve likely invested a lot of time and money on your site to communicate your brand, what you sell, etc. Do you really need a profile page with your address and contact info? That’s already on your own site! What gives here?
The reason they and others like Yellowpages use "profile pages" is so you cannot see and monitor in detail the click activity for that profile page. They control the page, they control the server, they control the data. All you get from them are crude visitor reports. If they charged you when people clicked directly to your actual web site then you would be able to monitor the activity in great detail. How so? Well, if you have a decent web analytics program you could see what time of day the clicks occur on your site. If a lot of the clicks occur between midnight and 5 a.m. there’s a huge chance the clicks are not human, rather they are spider activated. Or worse they are activated by humans who are overseas and paid pennies to click on sites like yours to raise the click count. Here’s another thing you can check with a good analytic program …. How long are the visitors on your site? If a lot of the visits are less than 1 second then you know the visit was by a spider. They come and go within milliseconds and show up on most analytic programs as a 0 second or 1 second visit. Again, you can only monitor this sort of stuff on your own site with a tool like Google Analytics (a free program). But since you are charged for clicks on your CitySearch profile page, you are at their mercy when it comes to reporting. And all they share with you are raw visits or something like that. And as I’ve discussed you have no way of knowing who or what caused those visits, when they occured, and so on. I have talked with CitySearch's click fraud team (the foxes that guard the hen house) in the past and demanded more detailed reports. I was promised them but was also told that they would take weeks to produce. Did they ever send them? No. They never called back. They never sent the reports. I can't say I was surprised.
In closing, I see someone has initiated a class-action lawsuit against CitySearch. I wish them luck.
