Mark Forrester

SA Top Sites: South African websites only?

I recently signed up with SA Top Sites hoping to gain some publicity and South African traffic to my site. So far all it has done is reveal the amount of visitors frequenting my site to anyone who wants the details, an untrue reflection as well.

I am completely behind any proudly South African company trying to unite its people, and I think their concept is great. I do get a little tense though when they specify, “SA Top Sites is open to SOUTH AFRICAN websites only. Your content must have some relevance to South Africa or else your application will be rejected.” and then some random Malaysian dude’s technology site is their in the rankings. I think his website title is a bit of a give away: IT-SIDEWAYS: TECH BLOG MALAYSIA. Come on Top Sites, surely there is basic validation preventing this?

SA Top Sites

I think I have just given this Malaysian fella more traffic than I have received in total from SA Top Sites. Currently, I have had 5 unique visitors come from SA Top Sites. Explain to me its benefits again, besides giving it loads of backlinks, and building its page rank?

If you have a little SA Top Sites badge, let me know how its working for you.

SA Top Sites please don’t ban me now, I’m just trying to help you better your product. Cos I’m a nice guy 🙂

In

5 responses

  1. StNick Avatar
    StNick

    I’ve seen a handful of new users since registering whom I have to assume saw my site in the rankings, since we started out as a rather close community of friends. Not much to write home about, but perhaps as the user-base increases, we’ll see more traffic in the future.

    Reply
  2. Nico Avatar
    Nico

    Yeah, or dropitlikeitshoff.com which has absolutely no relevance to South Africa, but is run by a South African.

    Reply
  3. KarooStars Avatar
    KarooStars

    I could not agree more! Let’s remove the sites that are not relevant to South Africa. satopsites.com should simply be South Africa’s Top Websites. Please don’t ban me either. 🙂

    Reply
  4. Justin (Top Sites Owner) Avatar
    Justin (Top Sites Owner)

    The comments from everyone and in particular Mark are very interesting. What I can tell you about SA only sites is that we went through a period where we had automatic appoval of sites. This however led to an array of sites (that I missed) that were not of SA nature.

    I then went through the painstaking process of reviewing every site on Top Sites and deleting those which had no relevance to SA. I also changed the automatic approval process and now each site that signs up must be SA or they get deleted before they even display on top sites.

    It’s not perfect and yes there are sites that on the outset don’t appear local but if a SA guy owns it then surely that is relevant to sa?

    Either way it’s good to hear both good and bad comments about top sites. It certainly helps in understanding what the user perception is because most people never say anything

    Reply
  5. Marc de Douallier Avatar
    Marc de Douallier

    I used to think SA Top Sites was good. Checking the amount of unique visits ect was fairly cool, but I think the running of SA Top Sites really sucks. Their email address doesn’t work, and hasn’t worked since I signed up, and their forum is even worse. No one gets back to you with your details to log in.

    Further more, for some screwball reason, the counter in now being reset at 4pm every day (Oh thats if it works at all)

    Come on Justin – run the site or give up competely and close it…..

    Reply

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