Monday, October 5, 2009

Say No to Traffic Exchange

When new webmasters set out to take their claim on the online business world they use Google searching for ways to get free traffic. Usually their searches will lead them to some undesirable places which are known as “the bad places” of the web. I remember when I first started I was desperate to get even the smallest amount of traffic and if a website said they would get me traffic I would be quick to sign up. Something strange I noticed was the people using the traffic exchange would be very willing to sign up for my affiliate programs making it easy to make a little money. Something else I noticed was they would be quick to quite the programs as well probably giving it up for the next flashy thing to come their way. I guess to understand the quality of traffic you are getting you must understand what a traffic exchange is. A traffic exchange is a directory of sites and when you visit someone else’s website you earn a credit usually worth one visit from another webmaster.

The major problem with traffic exchanges is the traffic you are getting already has their own system or product they are selling and is usually not in the market for more. This means you are getting traffic to your site that has already started their own money making endeavor. So you spend eight hours looking at ad after ad and website after website while others do the same and you all look at each other’s website artificially inflating the stat counter. What is also funny is the majority of traffic exchanges are set on auto pilot so people don’t actually have to look at your website just click next page after 20 seconds. This means that you are getting hits from people that are not even looking at your website. There are also programmers which can create bots to visit your website giving the webmaster credit for visiting your website without them actually doing anything. So your actually taking the time to look at websites when a bot is looking at yours.

Search engines are also not big fans of traffic exchanges. They are not big fans of any website which uses artificial means to inflate traffic. They also do not like the websites because of the amount of spam which fills traffic exchanges so when submitting your website to one of these places do not expect much of a boost from Google and other major search engines and if you decide to link back to the traffic exchanges then you can expect to actually drop within the SERPs. Anyway it is much better to learn SEO and other forms of getting traffic organically rather than using traffic exchanges.

7 comments:

  1. I think it is a shame how beginners do not realize the quality of traffic over quantity. Although, I can sympathize with them because I remember how frustrating it was for me when I had no traffic and all I wanted was for someone to visit my website. It can still be hard to get those visitors driven to your site, but that is when the power of SEO comes into play.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, I'm learning. I don't know what you mean by bad places. Do you mean porn, or snuff? I think a large quantity of qualities is what people are going for. At least what i go for.
    Two Voices | Two Guys

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Patera. 'Bad Places' don't actually mean bad as in immoral since the Search engines don't really have morals. Instead, think of bad plaecs as sites that are of poor quality. Sites that are obvious spam link farms would be a bad place. There is no value in links from these sites anyway, especially when you calculate out the strength given back to your site (0)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you all for commenting and hello. I think for the next post I will cover "bad places" there is a couple diffrnet types. I highly beleive that quality should always be over quantity.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ahh !!! I thought link exchange is losing its power slowly.. but your article emphasizes the aftermath of traffic exchange. I am afraid that the future days are going to be really tough.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Car Rental, yes I think as well the power of link exchange is diminishing rapidly and really moving towards social medias the blogosphere ect. With the way the economy is going the online world will be extremely competitive though we who are already here will have a great advantage. Anyway thanks for commenting.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You're right! Search engines prefer organic traffic than artificial ones..also sites that are using this method have higher chances of getting their sites penalized or worst baned by Google...in doing online business, always keep in mind that going organic is the best option.

    ReplyDelete