I’ll go ahead and tell you that my experience with SEScout (SES) has not been a great one. I do think it has it’s purposes but only as a secondary tool and here’s a list of reasons why.
1.) Yesterday I went to check my rankings and ALL of my rankings jumped at least 200 spots…that’s right…all of them. They’re all hosted on the same IP but for the most gray is as close to black as I get. Regardless, my first thought was SHIT! I just got whacked with a penalty on one of the domains and they connected with all of the domains on that IP. But I had NO idea which domain it was so I immediately start freaking out, looking at all of my link profiles, etc, etc. After about 5 hours of angst, I decide I will manually check each domain even though they’re scattered from about 250-450. As I check the first one…BOOM…I’m still on the first page…right where I was the day before. I continue to check and the same is true. I realize that I should have immediately checked them manually but when you see a drop that huge across 40 domains hosted on the same IP it only makes sense that something bad has happened…plus, who wants to check a ranking of 435? Anyways, the rankings are still all over the place in SESscout and WAY, WAY off. I could go on about how bad off the software can be at times.
2.) Don’t give me this “BETA” shit when I’m paying you! - I’ve noticed a lot of service providers are starting to do this. They charge you for a service and then tell you it’s in beta any time there’s a problem. Alpha, Beta, Theta…I don’t give a shit if you’re charging me for the service. Beta’s are supposed to be free. Think about it? People run betas so they can get the help of other users to find bugs so they can then sell to the public. I’m sure if the owner was to say, “hey…I’m going to offer free beta trials to X # of users until we get the bugs out” then plenty of folks would line up and provide excellent feedback. But instead, the developers got greedy and asked people to pay so they could do them a favor. It’s like…“Excuse me…I’m testing this elevator. If you pay me $10, I’ll let you ride it rather ride that other, free elevator. But don’t forget…that other elevator is a LOT slower so you should pay me instead. Oh and one last thing…It’s very likely that something will go wrong during your ride up so please push the alarm button any time somthething does and we’ll take note of it. Thanks!”
3.) If you’re going to charge me, offer customer support - on the UI, there’s a button that says “Contact Us”, where you can write an email to the dev team if there’s a problem. (But only after he’s begged you not to email him in the preceding paragraph…hah) Anyways, generally when you use a “Contact Us” button, you’re saying, “Hey contact us and we’ll get right back to you as soon as we can!”, but not here…the Contact Us button means, “We just put this here to create a facad of customer support…We might read your email, but we’re definitely not going to respond.” Why do I know this? Because I’ve sent at least 5 emails with specific questions (which aren’t answered in the FAQ or anywhere else on the site) and I have yet to get a single response.
4.) I actually just saw (as I was writing this post) where the director posted a blog post chastising those who were impatient. Hey brainiac…next time you send everyone’s rankings to the fucking moon, why don’t you put up a post warning people so they don’t waist half a day freaking out rather than making a post where you mock those who may have contacted you asking what was going on?
I don’t have time to keep going right this second, but I’ve got so much evidence (via screenshots) of how inaccurate this thing has been and I could tell you more stories about how customer support literally doesn’t exists.
The guys who make this may be good folks, but I would suggest not charging people until you provide them with consistent service. And to all of those considering using SESScout I would HIGHLY suggest you wait until the bugs are worked out. You can use Raven for free for a month without a credit card and it’s tracker has more features and is better in the first place…it just only updates weekly. If nothing else, have all of your sites and keywords in BOTH raven and SES so you can check Raven to make sure SES hasn’t just gone haywire AGAIN.
1.) Yesterday I went to check my rankings and ALL of my rankings jumped at least 200 spots…that’s right…all of them. They’re all hosted on the same IP but for the most gray is as close to black as I get. Regardless, my first thought was SHIT! I just got whacked with a penalty on one of the domains and they connected with all of the domains on that IP. But I had NO idea which domain it was so I immediately start freaking out, looking at all of my link profiles, etc, etc. After about 5 hours of angst, I decide I will manually check each domain even though they’re scattered from about 250-450. As I check the first one…BOOM…I’m still on the first page…right where I was the day before. I continue to check and the same is true. I realize that I should have immediately checked them manually but when you see a drop that huge across 40 domains hosted on the same IP it only makes sense that something bad has happened…plus, who wants to check a ranking of 435? Anyways, the rankings are still all over the place in SESscout and WAY, WAY off. I could go on about how bad off the software can be at times.
2.) Don’t give me this “BETA” shit when I’m paying you! - I’ve noticed a lot of service providers are starting to do this. They charge you for a service and then tell you it’s in beta any time there’s a problem. Alpha, Beta, Theta…I don’t give a shit if you’re charging me for the service. Beta’s are supposed to be free. Think about it? People run betas so they can get the help of other users to find bugs so they can then sell to the public. I’m sure if the owner was to say, “hey…I’m going to offer free beta trials to X # of users until we get the bugs out” then plenty of folks would line up and provide excellent feedback. But instead, the developers got greedy and asked people to pay so they could do them a favor. It’s like…“Excuse me…I’m testing this elevator. If you pay me $10, I’ll let you ride it rather ride that other, free elevator. But don’t forget…that other elevator is a LOT slower so you should pay me instead. Oh and one last thing…It’s very likely that something will go wrong during your ride up so please push the alarm button any time somthething does and we’ll take note of it. Thanks!”
3.) If you’re going to charge me, offer customer support - on the UI, there’s a button that says “Contact Us”, where you can write an email to the dev team if there’s a problem. (But only after he’s begged you not to email him in the preceding paragraph…hah) Anyways, generally when you use a “Contact Us” button, you’re saying, “Hey contact us and we’ll get right back to you as soon as we can!”, but not here…the Contact Us button means, “We just put this here to create a facad of customer support…We might read your email, but we’re definitely not going to respond.” Why do I know this? Because I’ve sent at least 5 emails with specific questions (which aren’t answered in the FAQ or anywhere else on the site) and I have yet to get a single response.
4.) I actually just saw (as I was writing this post) where the director posted a blog post chastising those who were impatient. Hey brainiac…next time you send everyone’s rankings to the fucking moon, why don’t you put up a post warning people so they don’t waist half a day freaking out rather than making a post where you mock those who may have contacted you asking what was going on?
I don’t have time to keep going right this second, but I’ve got so much evidence (via screenshots) of how inaccurate this thing has been and I could tell you more stories about how customer support literally doesn’t exists.
The guys who make this may be good folks, but I would suggest not charging people until you provide them with consistent service. And to all of those considering using SESScout I would HIGHLY suggest you wait until the bugs are worked out. You can use Raven for free for a month without a credit card and it’s tracker has more features and is better in the first place…it just only updates weekly. If nothing else, have all of your sites and keywords in BOTH raven and SES so you can check Raven to make sure SES hasn’t just gone haywire AGAIN.
