Ineffective and Unethical Web Site Promotion
Methods
By Oudam Em
In this article I discuss some ineffective and/or unethical website promotion
tactics. I talk about them here so that you won't waste your time and resources
pursuing them.
Spamming
If you're like
me, you're sick and tired of receiving hundreds of spam messages in your mailbox
every morning, and you would not consider buying anything they had to offer,
even if it's something you really wanted.
Needless to say, spammers are not the most decent people in the world, and it
comes as no surprise that many of them are also scam artists posing as eBay or
PayPal to steal your credit card information. Everday inexperienced and
unsuspecting internet users continue to fall prey to unscrupulous characters
from the dark corners of cyberspace.
While spamming is not a completely ineffective promotion tactic, I don't
recommend it as a way to promote your site at all. Not only is spamming highly
intrusive and unethical, but it could also get you into a lot of trouble. Just
imagine how many people you'd have to anger to make a sale or to get a visitor
to your site. The search engines will ban your site when they find out that you
have been spamming. Various laws are now being made to prosecute spammers.
Pop-up/Pop-under Traffic Schemes
Have you seen ads offering "1,000 visitors for $9.95"?
Consider this: many companies are willing to pay up to $10 or more for every
visitor Google or Overture sends to their site. Why wouldn't they spend their
$10 to get 1,000 visitors from pop-up ad brokers, instead?
Perhaps they're smart enough to realize that the 1,000 "visitors" they would get
from having their sites displayed in pop-up and pop-under windows on other sites
are worth less than the one legitimate visitor Google or Overture sends
them.
While not necessarily unethical, pop-up advertising is no longer as effective as
it used to be. Most web surfers find pop-ups annoying and intrusive, and many
now use pop-up blockers to avoid them. Even those who don't have blockers
installed on their browsers have grown accustomed to instinctively close pop-ups
and pop-unders without taking a glance at them.
A pop-up exchange is a program that allows members to show pop-up windows
linking to one another's site. As a member of the exchange, your site would
display a pop-up linking to another member's site every time someone visits your
site. There is usually an exchange ratio involved. A 2:1 exchange ratio means
that for every two pop-ups you show on your site, your pop-up would be displayed
once on someone else's site.
Pop-up exchanges aren't especially effective for the reasons mentioned above.
Furthermore, they are vulnerable to cheaters who use automated means to
fraudulently inflate their credits.
Surfing Exchanges
Surfing
exchanges are programs where you surf other people's web sites to get others to
surf yours.
In start-page exchanges you to set your home page to a special URL on which
another member's site will be displayed every time you start your browser.
Alternatively, you may simply bookmark the URL and receive credit every time you
visit it.
Click exchanges allow you to earn credits by clicking on other people's links.
There is usually a 20- or 30-second timer that counts down the required amount
of time you must spend on the site. In return your link will be exposed to other
members to click on.
Like pop-up exchanges, these schemes will get you traffic just for the sake of
getting traffic-- little of it be of any use. Most people who join these
programs are more interested in accumulating credits rather than looking through
your site. Many run several traffic exchange programs simultaneously (in
different windows) to gain credits on multiple programs rather than exploring a
site that they're supposed to explore.
Link Farming
A link farm is a website that has little or no original content and is created
for the sole purpose of exchanging links with other websites. Like free-for-all
(FFA) pages, link farms have nothing but links to other websites. Link farming
has flourished in response to the growing emphasis on link popularity for search
placement by many search engines.
Never exchange links with a link farm. Many search engines will penalize or even
ban your site for linking to link farms. Obviously, you have no control over who
links to you, so you cannot be penalized when link farms link to you. But
linking back to them is another story.
Free-for-all (FFA) sites allow anyone to post links on their pages. FFA's
generally don't require you to link back to them, so listing your site on FFAs
will not hurt your rankings. However, link popularity is not so much as about
the sheer number of links to your site as it is about the number of quality
links to your site. Search engines are smart enough to tell which links are
relevant and which aren't. Securing a handful of inbound links from qualified
sites will do you more good than having your site listed on a thousand FFAs.
Article by Oudam Em. Oudam is the webmaster of
UnlimitedTraffic.net, a site that
offers a wide range of effective and
affordable website traffic building solutions. Visit his site for more free
tips and tutorials on optimizing and promoting your site.
Please feel
free to re-publish this article on your website, provided that the above
resource box is included at the bottom of the article and that all links within
the box remain active.
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