A traffic scam is designed to give a false sense that you can spend any amount of money and you will magically begin to get high quality traffic. This cannot be any further from the truth. These scams are designed to bring you fake hits, popup, popunder and proxy based traffic. The worst quality you can imagine and none will ever yield a sale. Below you will see a list of the above items and what they actually are.

Popups These are ads that rudely popup into a surfers face when they are browsing or surfing the web. These were widely used in the 90's and now have been ported into rollover or flying ads that again are very intrusive to a surfer.

Popunders These types of ads are a bit more sneakier as they do not appear until all browsers are closed and there is an advertisement sitting on your desktop, again very intrusive.

Fake hit machines Yes, these exist and most of these traffic scams use them in a massive way. They setup scripts to change the referrer of a faked hit to make it appear like it is real and coming from somewhere.

Proxy hits This is by far the dirtiest tactic of them all. Server proxy lists are put together, shared and sometimes even sold to other people to use as a mask to hide themselves while they spam, spoof hits or possibly even worse like sending a virus from an internet cafe.

How to spot one?

Spotting out these hits is really not that difficult at all. Your average visitor will stay at the page for sometime before closing it. So have a look at your logs and see how long these guys stay. Take your average user and weigh that against some of the more suspicious ones. Keep in mind that bots such as Google or Yahoo Slurp will identify themselves very clearly in your logs and might have a short visit period. The unique visitor that stays 2 seconds and seems to stay only 2 seconds visit after visit is most likely a "fake" hit.

These companies even use these fake hits to boost PR and Alexa ranking. So don't judge these guys because they have a high ranking. It is very hard to find a really traffic provider that is not scamming to some degree.

If everyone is a scam then what is the solution?

Well not everyone is a scam but most of the "cheap hits" programs are. So we advise you stay away from all of them and just build the traffic yourself. Search engine traffic has proven time and time again to be the highest quality of traffic to a website. It is completely targeted to your audience because the user was searching for you.

The answer to building your traffic is quite simple - content is king. The idea is to build as much content as possible so that the search engines will come around spider then index your pages. Relative content will yield the results you seek. For example if you put together articles related to your "widget" and keywords appear in your article about these "wdigets" and what they do then there is a greater chance when some one searches for "super widget" that they will find your site.

There is a lot of calculation in a search engine algorithm but it has been proven that the one thing that remains the same is content out weighs all other factors.

How to I build effective pages?

We have designed our software Maximum Traffic with search engines algorithms as the primary goal. We allow you to build your pages quickly and effectively to get you the highest possible rankings in the search engines. Our 15 day trial version will even yield results in that short of a time.

Using the software once might work but to be successful for the long-term effect you need to build build build and then build some more.

Who are the scammers?

We cannot name the names of the site for legal reasons but we can say most of them are the same site moving form domain name to domain name because of getting a bad reputation. These sites saturate the market and then move the domain to a new one and claim that they are the new kid on the block with the best traffic. Don't get duped by these guys, do a Whois on the domain, call the company up, find a physical address and call these guys out. Do not let them take your hard earned money and give you nothing in return.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has shed some light on this internet craze. The thing to remember is that search engine optimization takes time and most of all patience. Lack of patience will just have you spending money in the wrong places. We have developed a line of products for people to use that will get them results - end of story. We are in this long term and will be around for many more years to come.

Creating a successful product allows us to never have to worry about customer satisfaction or having to pickup and move our shop because of a bad reputation. We feel that if we are upfront and honest with each and every person then in the long run they will understand that we are all in this together. We all should be helping each other have successful web sites and no trying to steal each others profits.

Put yourself in the surfer's shoes for a moment. Would you open any of those intrusive ads? So then why would anyone want to open yours or furthermore want to use your service by finding it in a popup or popunder ad?

Good luck and God bless.