Quality Traffic Exchange Sites – Do They Work?

quality traffic exchange

In the search for higher volumes of traffic for websites, people often turn to one of the few quality traffic exchange sites. Exchange sites have been developed with one goal in mind. This is to get vast loads of traffic sent to your website to build traffic momentum.

But do they really work?

There are a lot of people who will argue that quality traffic exchange sites can boost your website views and site exposure. And simply put, yes, they can. But at what cost to your site ranking on the search engines?

Poor Viewer Quality

I have personally used traffic exchange sites. Trafficadbar, Easyhits4U, Rebrandable Traffic (RT), etc. And yes, I had an instant, massive increase in traffic to my website or the links that I had been promoting. But I found that the site views are generally very low quality. By this, I mean that there was no obvious intent by any of the viewers to interact with my site or access any content.

As an example, I promoted a mail opt-in funnel through one traffic generation system. What I received was a huge amount of additional traffic to my site via the opt-in link, however, the email addresses I received were mostly from the same email domain (IE yahoo.com). Also, none of them was authenticated. Meaning, they did not respond to my generated follow up email asking them to confirm their subscriptions to my newsletters etc. Those who opted in to the program I was promoting did not go through to purchase anything.

Google AnalyticsHowever, when I have used organic traffic generation methods to engage people with my website offerings I have found positive confirmation to subscriptions. Additionally, around 1 in 12 visitors would accept an offer to join my program.

High Bounce Rates

So I did a check on Google Analytics. The result of using these traffic exchange sites was that the bounce rates shot up significantly. This can only suggest that none of the visitors were venturing beyond the first page or lead page of the websites.

Reduced Time Spent on Site

Another side effect of the traffic exchange sites is the reduced time spent on the user’s website. Part of the Google algorithm relates to how well your viewers interact with your website. Poor interaction will only show the search engines that your site is of little value to your user’s.

Some better quality traffic exchange sites force minimum view times. For manual exchange sites, this means that you need to wait for 10 seconds or so, generally long enough for a website to load up. But it is not long enough for a person to look around a site.

How Do Traffic Exchanges Work

The way traffic exchanges work is by submitting your website to the exchange group for them to farm out to others to look at. Generally, what happens is that you are awarded points or credits for each website you look at.

Traffic Exchange Sites

 

So technically the more sites you visit, the more credit you earn. Your credit is then offset against others who view your site. So the more credit you have the more people will view your site in order to earn their own credits.

It is a simple enough process. However, the reality is that the primary aim of people will be to just click through your site as soon as they are able. So then they can go on to click the next site, and the next, etc so they can maximize their credits. This is what produces the high click-through rates and low view times in your Google Analytic results.

Some poor quality traffic exchange sites would even allow the use of bots to generate continuous views on websites automatically, driving masses of traffic without ever physically viewing a site.

Google Spiders see it as Forced Traffic

The Search engine ranking matrix doesn’t only look at the volume of traffic that goes to/ through your site. It looks at how engaging your site is to your readers by measuring their time spent on the site and how far into it they go. Even with the quality traffic exchange groups trying to provide a better experience by enforcing minimum stay times on websites, it is not enough to help rank your website in the search engines.

I have been told that Google spiders troll the exchange sites and can see what websites are active on them. Given Google is all about providing quality search experience.

Organically generated traffic is definitely rewarded but forced traffic is not.

How to Get Quality Organic Traffic

Learn Search Engine Optimization forI think this should be the aim of all content marketing writers. Getting quality online organic traffic to your website would seem the logical best practice. But how hard is it to do?

The key is in your search engine optimization (SEO) and the quality of your content. Finding the best keywords to maximize your exposure and search hits is the first process. You can find out a bit more about that on a recent post I wrote about “what is the best keyword research tool“.

Make sure you have good, relevant internal and external links within your content that relate to your content and keywords. This is a good start. Then crafting some engaging content that will jell with your target audience. Content writing is a bit of an art, but it does have to be difficult.

Quality Traffic Exchange Sites

My experience with exchange sites has not been all that positive. And I feel that my sites have been adversely affected by my Search Engine ranking when I have used them. Also, to make them work you really need to subscribe to them. This gives you access the more semi-automated functionality. Have a look at Trafficadbar as an example. You can buy different levels of access to boost your exposure to other searchers.

Probably the best traffic generator I have found is the Global Moneyline program. This one is not a traffic exchange as such. But it allows you to promote your websites or business to other people through the Global Moneyline program. Again, to make any real headway with it you need to upgrade from the free account to access the larger group internal mail outs.

But it would certainly be my pick of the quality traffic exchange sites available. It seems to generate more organic type of traffic. Users are encouraged to interact with other users and their offerings rather than just click through websites.

Personally, I am happier to spend any marketing money on direct marketing ads, Google advertising and social media as it has a more targeted impact if you are wanting to generate traffic to your site.

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11 thoughts on “Quality Traffic Exchange Sites – Do They Work?”

  1. It’s always been my impression that getting back links via link marketing sites does not really works as some of us hope. I’ve tried getting back links, like yourself the bounce rate was high and it was not worth the money I put into it. I’ve tried creating back links now by leaving comments or commenting in forums.

    If your visitors are coming from the same IP address, how does Google view that?

    1. Yes I think you are right on track there … I have also been using various forums to post comment and articles. Have you tried Quora? Good place to demonstrate your knowledge and help people out while advertising your site and getting backlinks. 

      cheers

      James

  2. Thank you for helping us understand how Quality Traffic Exchange Sites work.It is important to get traffic on website but it is the most important when that traffic turned into customers.To succeed in this business , it is a process and it requires much effort that’s why many pretend to use that effort but try to trick others where you find many sites are called scams.

    I didn’t try those sites but i hope they will increase their ways of doing to bear fruits to their users. 

    1. Hi Julienne,  most of the traffic I experienced through exchange sites and rebranding etc has been pretty low quality and very little conversions happening from it. No comments gained, not many sales and resulted in poor website stats. 

  3. Hi James

    Although I consider myself a content marketer, I haven’t used traffic exchange site before. After reading this, I’m glad I haven’t! Google’s algorithm is definitely an enigma and sending poor quality traffic to your site really does your work no justice.

    It pays to do everything organically- yeah sure it takes time but it is your business at the end of the day. You mentioned  Global Moneyline program, have you used it yourself? 

    Thanks for the review, I’ve learnt something new here and that’s always good!

    Teresa

    1. Hi Teresa,  I really wanted to do this review because of the outcomes that I had personally experienced through using traffic exchange.  There are better options, I think… and I dont mind doing a bit of PPC advertising from time to time. But as you say, organic is the way to go. 

  4. I learn something new about this business every day.  I try very hard to capture and build my email list.  But I was not aware of email exchange sites.  Now that I know, based on your review here, I would not pay for that kind of service.  

    It annoys me to no end when I get all these unsolicited emails.  So as a result I report them as spam and move on.  I’m very careful not to annoy my readers right away with popups because that annoys me.  Many times I will just leave the sight when the first thing I get is a popup.

    We are always looking for faster ways to accumulate emails. So far it always come back to the old fashion way.

    Thanks for this good review.

    V. Pearl

    1. H Vanna,  Im not sure about email exchange sites – the ones I know are where you exchange your views on other peoples websites for their views on your sites.   Hence the traffic exchange. 

      I found I was getting a lot of delinquent email addresses being added through a pop-up I had a on one site. The were coming in through a traffic exchange like spam… .

      Building email lists is great. I have not been too good at doing this myself, but my list is growing and I get a bit of action from it.  Something that I need to work on. 

  5. I had heard of these traffic exchange sites and I was curious about how well they work to bring traffic. Your article is a very good rundown on these sites and the final verdict seems to be low quality traffic that can actually hurt your organic traffic objectives through the search engines, especially Google. I will steer clear of these traffic exchanges on your advice and when I start to have an ad budget will use PPC advertising from Bing or maybe MediaVine to start. Thank you for some very important, to me, information.

    1. Hi Alexander,  yes i think if you want to generate targeted traffic then PPC is the way to go. Even the better quality traffic exchange sites tend to just funnel all sorts of traffic, so you are never really in control of who you are targeting.

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