Big Roo Search Engine - Unauthorized Review (with some corrections)
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You may or may not have heard about a search directory called Big Roo. According to the Way Back Machine Internet Archive, Big Roo started life as a mobile phone reseller and it appears it has been morphed into a business directory for the south-east Queensland area.
There are four major reasons why I don’t think listing in Big Roo is a good idea. These reasons are:
1. One you submit your business details for a “free” listing, you will get regularly called by telemarketers wanting you to upgrade your free listing to a “premium listing”. Expect a call at least every 2-3 weeks. The cost is $195 for 3 months. Judging by the accents of the telemarketers, and the quality of the phone lines they use, Big Roo use a telemarketing centre somewhere in India (my mistake, it is the Philippines - see comments from Tony below).
This free listing may not cost you money, but it will definitely cost you time fielding the calls.
2. The $195 price tag to upgrade to a premium listing sounds OK on the face of it, the trouble is that Big Roo cannot tell you how many visitors they get a day. They can’t even tell you the number of page hits (a much bigger number) their directory gets each day. Now this information isn’t hard to get.
All web servers give these sorts of statistics. If Big Roo were fair dinkum about their coverage they would make this information publicly available.
3. bigroo.com has a Google Page Rank of 3 out of a possible 10 (check yourself). bigroo.com.au has a PR of 1. This means that there are not many incoming links to either of the Big Roo domains. You would think a web directory company would know a little about SEO and at least get a PR 5 or 6.
4. From an SEO point of view, a listing in Big Roo is next to useless. There is limited opportunity to choose your anchor text and the link goes to a Big Roo web page that seems to do a redirect to the advertiser’s web page, rather than take the reader there directly. In other words no link juice flows from the Big Roo directory to the advertiser’s web pages.
If you’re looking for SEO friendly directories, do a search on PHP powered link directories like this free Australian Link Directory. The links in thse sorts of directories are direct and add to Google’sposition calculations.
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These images go with the comments below from Big Roo and my response. 
Comment by Tony
Comments from Tony of Big Roo - see my response after his =====
It’s amazing how, whenever someone tries to do something different, there’s always some “the glass is half empty” person that tries to bring them down. Tall poppy syndrome, I believe it’s called.
To be honest, I’m not sure why I am glorifying these snide comments with a response, but thought I’d set the record straight and point out the inaccuracies.
Yes, as you point out, the domain name www. BigRoo .com was used for a previous project, as have many domain names on the Internet. I can’t see how anyone can read something negative or sinister into that.
Then you say: One (sic) you submit your business details for a ‘free’ listing, you will get regularly called by telemarketers wanting you to upgrade your free listing to a ‘premium listing’. Expect a call at least every 2-3 weeks.
Big Roo says: Not true. We call each Free listing once to encourage people to make sure their published description is accurate and up-to-date. Call-backs are only made to people expressing an interest in Big Roo’s services.
You say: Judging by the accents of the telemarketers, and the quality of the phone lines they use, Big Roo use a telemarketing centre somewhere in India.
Big Roo says: Not true. The telemarketers are in Manila, Philippines and we make no secret of this. They are doing a good job. We use them to keep the costs down for Australian businesses using Big Roo. The stores are full of goods made in China, which the Australian public buys to save money. What’s the difference?
You say: The $195 price tag to upgrade to a premium listing sounds OK on the face of it, the trouble is that Big Roo cannot tell you how many visitors they get a day. They can’t even tell you the number of page hits (a much bigger number) their directory gets each day. Now this information isn’t hard to get. All web servers give these sorts of statistics. If Big Roo were fair dinkum about their coverage they would make this information publicly available.
Big Roo says: Those statistics are easy to manipulate and therefore rather meaningless. The only number that matters is that of results. That’s why our telemarketers offer a low-cost, three-month trial with no lock-in contracts. We discount the $195 to $130 for the trial, so businesses can try the service. If it doesn’t work, the service can be cancelled at any time. We suggest businesses ask themselves this question, ‘If a Big Roo Premium listing resulted in just one order or new customer each month, would it pay for itself? If the answer is Yes, you should subscribe to a trial Premium listing on Big Roo immediately’.
You say: The Big Roo web site has a Google Page Rank of 1 out of a possible 10. This means that there are not many incoming links to Big Roo. You would think a web directory company would know a little about SEO and at least get a PR 5 or 6.
Big Roo says: Not true. Big Roo has a page ranking of 3. The Google home page has a ranking of 4. This page has no ranking.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon’s traffic rankings website Alexa has ranked Big Roo as one of the most popular websites in South-East Queensland and the only search engine in the Top 10. Big Roo is relatively new, but has achieved this position in just a short time. Please go to http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=571114
It would be nice if people like the anonymous writer of this contribution would support local businesses and avoid taking shots at those of us who are trying to achieve something positive.
Tony
BIG ROO
www. bigroo. com
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Thanks Tony.
The fact remains that you can’t or won’t give visitor numbers. If you were buying any sort of advertising you would usually want to know the readership numbers wouldn’t you? I would. Guessing by the Alexa Rank and Google PR I guess Big Roo gets less than 75 unique visitors per day.
The Alexa rank you mention is fine, but if you look at other Alexa rankings the Australian domain Big Roo site ranks over 5 million in terms of popularity (the dot com site ranks far better), whereas this little Blog ranks around the million mark.
Comment by Tony
If you were as honest and upright as you are trying to project, you wouldn’t edit my posts and prioritise your own.
If you were as smart as you think, you would understand that our main site is at www . bigroo . com not www . bigroo .com. au (I’m sure you’ll edit these urls to remove the links).
So, again you are wrong. The Traffic Rank for bigroo .com is 675,279 (August 1, 2007) and improving. We know this is not ideal and we are working on it. Thanks for the support and encouragement (not).
This is my last word on this subject here, but I’m sure you will not be able to resist taking another shot at us to demonstrate your superior knowledge. Go for it, we’re big boys.
Comment by Tony
The way you go back and edit your previous posts is totally unethical. I thought this was a ‘no-no’ for bloggers. It certainly makes it impossible to have a meaningful debate with you. Initially you clearly did not make any distinction between our .com.au and our .com domain names. Now you have gone back and changed your previous submissions to make it look as if you did include BigRoo.com in your initial inaccurate claims. This rewrite of history (some of it highlighted in bold) is just pathetic and gives you no credibility.
============ REPSONSE ===================
I guess I can’t win. If I correct a mistake it’s unethical and rewriting history, if I don’t I’m publishing incorrect information. I published stats on both domains to set the record straight. If there are any other errors of fact, please list them and I will correct them.
Once again thank you for your contribution Tony.
Comment by Tony
Publishing corrections to previous erroneous postings is of course fair and reasonable, and the correct thing to do.
However, what you are doing is editing previous postings to make it appear that you were accurate and balanced in the first place.
Big difference.
Your initial criticism about Big Roo related only to BigRoo.com.au. You subsequently went back and added BigRoo.com.
In my opinion, for your blog to be credible it needs to publish postings in sequence and unedited, so that intelligent readers can see the debate unfold and come to their own conclusions.
You also need to sort out your server so that is doesn’t crash every day as it seems to now.
Let’s end this debate now. It’s been fun. Thanks.
Comment by John
I received an unsolicited email from bigroo. After looking at their site, their alexa rankings(675,368 for bigroo.com and 5,548,461 for bigroo.com.au), their unwillingness to provide traffic details…I would definitely choose not to advertise with them. I also think Tony needs to lighten up…the above criticisms are very valid and hardly ’snide’ as he puts it, and should be taken as constructive. My basic question to Tony would be…if the service is so good, then why not charge on a per-click basis?
Comment by John
I would also like to make a few more comments…simply because I love receiving unsolicited email so much.
1. ‘Regional Search Engine, Worldwide Audience’….great, how many worldwide?
2. They are situated at Level 3 Waterfront Place Brisbane. Also located at Level 3 Waterfront Place are ‘Waterfront Executive Offices’. These are virtual offices which provide ‘A prestigious business address for your business card, letterhead and promotional materials’.
3. I would hardly call the above criticism Tall Poppy Syndrome. In fact, I think that this might be the standard response to anybody who raises questions about the quality of the service.
I do, however, have an open mind, and would be thrilled to learn of information and statistics that prove me wrong, and demonstrate Big Roo to be everything they claim and more! (though I might be waiting a while)
Comment by Stuart
Hmmm … an interesting read. We got our phone call today and the stats here are pretty much what I was expecting to see. When I asked about where they were promoting their site the answers were a little vague and not entirely relevant to a web design and text business.
Comment by Russ
After taking Bigroo.com.au up on their free listing I have received a call at least every two weeks wanting me to upgrade my free listing to a premium listing. Every time they call me I ask them to provide me with a months premium listing for free, to prove to me that they are as good as they claim. Every time they refuse and tell me that I can get 6 months for the price of 4, or 3 months for the price of 2, or some other special that they have running at the moment. Every phone call is the same, takes 10 minutes of my time, and annoys me to no end. I had never even heard of bigroo before receiving a phone call from them, now they call me almost weekly. I have tried just hanging up on them or leaving them on hold but they always call straight back.
Comment by carolyn rae francis
After a phone call asking us to change our information to Big Roo I thought it was a great idea. But after looking at the web site I feel I have done our estate a bad deal. It possible please cancel and I will try and get another web provider to run our infomation. We do want to sell our blocks and speck house. But with this web site no way it will happen. So DONT ring me or email me as I note want to here from your company ever again.
Comment by baz
Persistent annoying phonecalls from some foreign source,can do without this
Comment by Mark Dickenson
Just another comment. The http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/ site you use for ranking
is also rubbish. I own the domain goan.com which has had no website on it since 1998! It ranks 5!! It links to another domain
bestofthenet.tv which I owned and discarded and has been bought by a link scavanger. That also ranks 5!!
Since I have actually had websites at times listed within the top 50,000 by Alexa worldwide (which I doubt is true),
I am seriously doubting your expertise in this subject, let alone your professional qualifcations.
I won’t surprised if you do not publish my comments.
Comment by John
Mark….Pagerank is a technology used by Google in order to rank websites based on the incoming number of links from other websites.
The reason that your domain name goan.com has a Pagerank of 5 is because it has 133 incoming links from websites of various levels of importance. It makes absolutely no difference if there has been no website since 1998. Pagerank is one of the pieces of the Google algorithm puzzle.
If you have a low Pagerank, it basically means that not enough people value your website enough to provide a link, and therefore it becomes difficult to get a good listing on Google. It could also mean that the links are exactly the same as another site. If you search for link:bigroo.com.au and link:goan.com on Google, you will see that they both have the same number of links from the same sources. Google may infact believe that bigroo.com.au is trying to game the system.
In relation to your claims that the ranking process is rubbish…Pagerank is a core measure used by just about every expert and enthusiast in the field of SEO and traffic acquisition. You’re fighting an uphill battle there.
I actually find it quite amusing (and a little bit worrying) that you are operating a “search-engine”, and you don’t know what Pagerank is or how it works.