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Friends Reunited Dating promises to be a hybrid social site in which you can reunite with old friends, maybe find an old flame or meet someone new to date.
It has a hip feel and is squarely aimed at the 20 to 30-year-old set. There is a lot of call back to Facebook design to make the whole site suggest a social media kind of feel to increase our feeling of being right where you should be, and knowing what should be done. On a closer look, this site begins to show that there isn’t much beyond this fancy front page. This is a modernized form of the template dating site that has been the source of so many scams in the past.
First Impressions
At first glance, Friends Reunited Dating looks really good. Not only is it a slick and appealing modern site with great colors, but when you scroll past the initial layout of stock photos and sign up boxes, there are links to online dating and relationship articles and links to About Us and all sorts of other things that are designed to reassure you about the safety and validity of the site.
The thing is, when you start to read the sentences slowly, you realize that they aren’t really saying anything at all. You can sign up for free, but you cannot even get a decent look at a profile search return without committing to a paid account. For a site that looks so good, it is all smoke and mirrors. There is also no mobile site available.
How does it compare in the real world?
Telling how this site stacks up in the real world is very tricky. For one, Alexa returns no traffic or use information, which is highly suspect – and yet the site is reported by many reputable sites to be 100% safe and heavily trafficked – so how can this be? The answer lies in a bit of backfiring brilliance on the part of the company behind FriendsReunitedDating.com. If you break down the site name
- Friends
- Reunited
- Dating
You have 3 of the most powerful search terms and keywords around. If a site is just looking at how many instances of visitors a site receives, or how many times it was searched for – guess what? This site is going to look like a winner. Alexa is a bit more advanced than that and rejects site traffic information if the name is too similar to keyword terms. What the owners did was stack the deck in their favor, but only on the surface. The generalized scam review sites don’t use the type of advanced programs that Alexa has to determine if a site’s traffic is real – they just see numbers and report them.
Features
Here are some of the basic features included on the site.
- Search and extended search options
- Paid members can IM, Chat and email other members
- Use tokens to increase your ranking or to see who viewed you.
- Tokens can also be used to send virtual gifts
The habit of making people pay to send a virtual gift is how site owners figured out how to monetize winking or poking people online. That is all that sending someone a virtual gift really is – except now you have to pay for it.
Price and membership
It is incredibly difficult to get a feel for how much the membership and token fees on this site cost. Until you are at the point that your payment information is taken (in the name of identity verification), even you won’t know! There are minimal discounts for signing up for multiple months and the payments are done on automatic subscription withdrawals. Canceling out is not simple or easy. Also, when you cancel your account there is no reassurance or indication that your profile will be deactivated, most likely it will stay put to inflate the active membership count.
Conclusion
Friends Reunited Dating is little more than an exercise in manipulative, but effective keyword marketing. The owners at least had the decency to try and use a modern looking template, unlike other keyword trap sites that often look like they were designed in the 80s. There is absolutely nothing of value on this site. Given the level of trickery involved in the naming of the site, think twice before trusting them with your payment information.