Traffic Equalizer Review - What the HECK?!
Okay, for a long time I've seen people piggy backing on my good search engine rankings and creating pages that basically copy search results pages from Google. They choose a phrase - ex. "work at home moms" and set up a page with links to and descriptions of the top ranking sites. Then they put their ad at the top.
I guess the idea is that these pages are optimized for the chosen phrases and should rank well because of it. I have yet to see pages like this that get any serious search engine rankings (I'm just talking about their location in the search results pages here - not PageRank or link popularity).
I also assume that the other objective with this method is to boost their actual Google PageRank by creating thousands of extra pages that link back to your home page. Okay, I've seen this work on a handful of sites. But let's be very, very serious...PR has very little to do with where you appear on the search results pages.
AHA! And it's Done with Traffic Equalizer
Today, I found out that many people use a program called Traffic Equalizer to do this (yeah, it's been around for a while, but I never actually checked it out). I'm not going to link to them, but you can find them by adding a .com to the end of their name. First, I have to say...I haven't used the program, so my Traffic Equalizer review is of the concept...not the actual product.
But the concept is ICK! It allows you to create tons of search engine spammy garbage pages...yucky, yucky. And let's say it increased your traffic, who cares? You have people visiting these garbage pages and perhaps clicking your ad at the top, but outside of that it's totally untargeted traffic. People make all these crazy pages targeting every keyword under the sun, but ultimately it does little for their actual businesses.
But most importantly..if you care about your reputation, why would you do this?
And yes, I know many webmasters don't care about their reputations, so I'm not speaking to them...I'm speaking to you, the person who does care.
When your visitors / customers do find these junky pages...how do you think it reflects upon you? I have come across these pages on websites of other Internet Marketers that I respected...but when I saw these pages, I thought - HUH??? Why are they doing this?
One of these Internet marketers appears to banned by Google now. Now, of course I don't know if it was because of this tactic. I doubt it, but this is just such a shady neighborhood to get involved in.
The web is made better by great websites like yours...don't get caught up in the hype.
I guess the idea is that these pages are optimized for the chosen phrases and should rank well because of it. I have yet to see pages like this that get any serious search engine rankings (I'm just talking about their location in the search results pages here - not PageRank or link popularity).
I also assume that the other objective with this method is to boost their actual Google PageRank by creating thousands of extra pages that link back to your home page. Okay, I've seen this work on a handful of sites. But let's be very, very serious...PR has very little to do with where you appear on the search results pages.
AHA! And it's Done with Traffic Equalizer
Today, I found out that many people use a program called Traffic Equalizer to do this (yeah, it's been around for a while, but I never actually checked it out). I'm not going to link to them, but you can find them by adding a .com to the end of their name. First, I have to say...I haven't used the program, so my Traffic Equalizer review is of the concept...not the actual product.
But the concept is ICK! It allows you to create tons of search engine spammy garbage pages...yucky, yucky. And let's say it increased your traffic, who cares? You have people visiting these garbage pages and perhaps clicking your ad at the top, but outside of that it's totally untargeted traffic. People make all these crazy pages targeting every keyword under the sun, but ultimately it does little for their actual businesses.
But most importantly..if you care about your reputation, why would you do this?
And yes, I know many webmasters don't care about their reputations, so I'm not speaking to them...I'm speaking to you, the person who does care.
When your visitors / customers do find these junky pages...how do you think it reflects upon you? I have come across these pages on websites of other Internet Marketers that I respected...but when I saw these pages, I thought - HUH??? Why are they doing this?
One of these Internet marketers appears to banned by Google now. Now, of course I don't know if it was because of this tactic. I doubt it, but this is just such a shady neighborhood to get involved in.
The web is made better by great websites like yours...don't get caught up in the hype.
6 Comments:
I agree and I disagree LOL. I promote Traffic Equalizer and the lesser known free scripts out there. Not so much for the reasons TE has outlined but more for my benefit.
As an RSS publisher, I don't mind at all to have my headlines on other sites and that's just it! It's only headlines. Ultimately if someone wants to read the whole story they have to return to my site. Plus because most of these feed aggregators are PHP or CGI generated, that means my html formatted links are on their websites without me even having to ask for a link exchange. So, I feel that is fair exchange, you get my (partial) content I get link backs.
To me the promise of RSS syndication is not only so my content will be subcribed by the individual RSS reader but also readers of other websites. I don't encourage my feed partners to simply put in any feed they want for obvious reasons. However, I can't stop them from doing so. Sure some webmasters are going to utilize it to create spammy pages but to my syndication partners I'll always recommend my feed first and I always nicely ask for feed removal if it appears on a site I think has no benefit to me to have a link back on ;-)
Hmmm...Lynette, so you mean TE is like an RSS feed that people use to take a feed from Google and try to get rankings from it? Does the content in an RSS feed actually show in the HTML code?
Interesting.
Alice, think of TE as an online RSS reader that is controlled by the webmaster. Yes they could take any RSS feed they find, and parse it (publish it) as a web page on their site. According to TE this could help with content relevance but I am not so sure. It depends on the feed. Some feeds contain nothing but a link and part of the headline. Some contain descriptions, headline and link. Mine has a title, link and only the first 255 characters of the content.
Yes! TE parsed pages (at least I assume) generates regular HTML. But you don't need TE to do that. For an example visit this page http://www.bizdome.com/modules/xoopsheadline/ and look at the source. All I did was pick up the feeds including yours :-) and my parser generates HTML content based on those RSS feeds.
I agree that Traffic Equalizer and Traffic Hurricane produce some pretty bad garbage. I tried out the latter and was pretty disappointed.
Another bigger problem is the footprint they leave. Plus the SE's are now hiring real people to find this junk.
However, there is another tools that can produce content that is NOT like TE:
Articlebot. Articlebot require quite a bit more HTML confidence, but it's worth the investment for webmasters. I just posted a review of it on my site:
http://www.wealth-ambition.com/articlebot-review.htm
Cheers,
Andrew
In the end some webmasters using RSS Equalizer with Traffic Equalizer will get banned at least from Google. Seems like using Yahoo News RSS Feeds shields them from being banned from Yahoo search engine, and they also keep appearing on MSN.
This is really spammy because according to the program they just fill a list of keywords, and the program creates a sitemap with a complete set of pages filled with automatically assembled spiderable rss feeds. Just a bunch of doorway pages.
Just a few days ago I found a site with PR of 5 while searching on Google using those programs, now the site has been banned.
Hey, Andrew - did you use ArticleBot to create the page you referred us to, because the spelling is atrocious. Also, you didn’t tell us how to create content for the “thousands of pages necessary”.
Sorry to gum up your comments, Alice, but Andrew's page has no comments area.
Kind regards,
Dave Jackson
http://monetizethis.blogspot.com/
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