How Can People Garuantee Traffic?, Do they buy it? Options

[SmellieNellie]

I am hearing about SEO companies who are providing guarantees to clients regarding the number of people visiting their site and I am assuming that they are buying traffic in. Would this be right?

Is this a reputable practice?

And if it is, do you know of any reputable companies who perhaps offer an affiliation scheme?

Thanks.

Nellie

[Jill]

Anyone can guarantee anything they want and if they can't deliver the customer simply doesn't have to pay.

That doesn't mean they actually deliver it every time.

[SearchRank]

I am hearing about SEO companies who are providing guarantees to clients regarding the number of people visiting their site? 

Is this a reputable practice?

So long as the company and client agree to those terms, it is certainly "reputable."

Really all the PPC companies do this because you create an account, you then create your ads and they are distributed to a variety or partner sites in which you pay for each visitor.

As far as SEOs who offer this, they are very likely buying PPC ads or inclusion into Yahoo or Teoma and then tracking visitors through their own proprietary systems. In most agreements, the client agrees to pay a certain amount for each visitor or an agreed amount for a certain number of visitors. It is up to the client to make sure those visitors are converting and they are getting a good ROI on their investment as is true with any marketing venture.

[Alan Perkins]

There are lots of scams around traffic guarantees.

OTOH we offer a traffic guarantee in some instances. I'm not saying that all guarantees are scams. Just lots of them. Proceed with caution.

[mcanerin]

There is another, "disreputable" version of this.

The "SEO" (and I use the term generously) requests you make a "landing page" (or a similar term with the same meaning) on your site. They then send the traffic to that page. Since it's on your site, you can monitor the traffic and therefore prove they are doing their job. You will find that the visitors all come from different IP's and places, thus proving they aren't just setting up scripts to automatically click (which is another way to guarantee traffic)

Sounds good, right?

Wrong.

What they do most commonly is buy blocks of popup ads. These ads load in your "landing page" thus generating a hit with a unique visitor. These popups are distributed to "free" p0rn and warez sites and generate a ton of traffic, though none of it is qualified. This is usually what is going on when you hit the "pop-up hell" on some sites. The people who place those ads *know* you are not going to click on any of them, but they don't get paid for that anyway - they get paid for traffic, not visitors or buyers.

"Traffic" is different from visitors. And qualified vistors is different from both.

There are variations on the theme, of course. You will find ads in most newspapers for people to "make money surfing the internet". These people are given a list of sites to visit and are paid a very small amount for each one the go to - of course, since it is such a small amount most of them just go through the list as fast as they possibly can, without actually looking at the site in question.

There are also automated "clickbots" and other techniques. At the end of the day all you are doing is paying someone to use up your bandwidth for no reason.

The bottom line: NEVER pay for traffic - visitors, yes, traffic, never. Make very certain that you can tell the difference and that you choose your suppliers carefully. The people posting above were, as far as I know, talking about visitors, not traffic.

It's easy to get the two confused. Scammers know this and will prey on it. caveat emptor.

Ian

[Randy]

Another thing some of these folks do to generate traffic is to buy up old, expired domains that still get traffic and redirect visitors to the old domains to your site. Terribly UN-targetted, so no sales will come of it.

So not a good idea on the marketing front at all. Unless you're an SEO and wanting to put a traffic guarantee into your contract. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/lol.gif)

[SmellieNellie]

OK - that helps - thanks all.

[computer books2d...]

there is so much scamming on the web - its scary what to believe and what not!?

[OldWelshGuy]

there is so much scamming on the web - its scary what to believe and what not!?

beleive the till, when it goes kerching, you got a quality visitor :-)

It is hard to know what is right, all you can do is read up on it. It is like business, there are people out there selling ads that they know are rubbish, they know you are not going to get any business fro it, they just don't care!

[rohgan03]

providing traffic guarantees to clients ??
thats new to me.

Do they also say under what keywords or how they measure relevancy?

[Randy]

The ones I've seen making such a guarantee don't guarantee anything but the number of visitors rohgan. Then they go out and buy that much "traffic".

Sounds good on the surface to unknowing webmasters, but is nothing but a scam.

[flipper]

I would rather have one qualified visitor who has typed in their search term to find our website than 100 from a traffic generating sceme. Traffic does not mean interested visitors as many 'Traffic' scemes send unqualified visitors to your site who have no interest in what you have to offer
.
Last year I signed up for what I thought was a good Traffic generator, where if a surfer types in our selected key word in their toolbar or did a search with the toolbar it would open up our index page automatically therby getting many extra visitors. This sceme does produce quite a lot of traffic in our logs, but forced visitors click away from our index page within seconds! This same index page is found on the normal search engines via the same key word and visitors stay for much longer viewing far more pages.

To me this shows that search engines are the best way of getting qualified visitors as they actually have clicked to select to to view the site and are not forced or redirected to it.

So, even if a company contacted me and offerd me 1 million hits per week for FREE, I would not sign up as from experience I know that I would only have to pay for the extra bandwidth the non qualified visitors are using.
The only instance I can see this as an advantage is if a site has lots of paid for ads, so the more the page is shown, the more the ads are shown

[rohgan03]

Thanks Randy. I thought so.
Flipper: Thats an interesting point of view that I never thought of. I m sure lot of these advertisement sustained sites do this.

[mazsola]

It is easy to guarantee traffic. Traffic in itself is useless. It's like having a bunch of uninterested people walking through your store, you'll end up with a larger cleaning bill but not more business. Traffic is insignificant unless it is targeted. If you can get targeted traffic from a reputable source, it might worth something.

[Randy]

Welcome Mazsola ! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/bye1.gif)