Why Not To Use Traffic Exchange Sites

If you have ever felt tempted to use any traffic exchange sites but you don’t know whether this practice might be beneficial for your blog or website, you’ve come to the perfect place. 

In this post, we’ll look at why website traffic exchange isn’t useful at all and why it can’t help you achieve anything. Sure, there are many services that sell themselves as being ‘the best traffic exchange sites’, but no matter what they might do, the fact is that using them can cost you time and money and give you false hope.

So, without further ado, here are some reasons you should never use any such services. 

Why you shouldn’t use traffic exchange sites

Before we move on, we have to start with a definition. What are traffic exchange sites? Well, for most bloggers, generating more traffic can be imperative as they might be looking for brand deals, for instance, for which they’d have to provide their number of unique visitors. 

There are three things that go into the operation of traffic exchange — the seller, the buyer, and the clicker. The latter is the most important one, without a doubt, as without them, the action itself wouldn’t exist. 

Some traffic exchange sites pay their clickers with just 2 cents per click. Even though many sites claim that they can assist you in generating traffic, what actually happens is that you’ll get visits that last for 1 or even less than 1 second. 

1. They affect your bounce rate

Your bounce rate matters a lot, so instead of focusing on the actual number of visitors that you get on your blog or website, you should rather focus on improving your content.

Whenever someone ends up on your site and they don’t find specifically what they are looking for, they immediately close the window and continue their search. With traffic exchange sites, the visits that you will get will last for about thirty seconds or less. 

On the contrary, if you get site visitors in a natural manner, whether that be organically or through PPC, they will most likely spend some time on your site, at least a couple of minutes. At least they will try to make up what the article is about and how it can help them. 

2. Some sites are spammy

Many of the websites that offer such services are packed with malware, adware, or viruses, and this is particularly true if they rely on automated software or bots.  

On top of that, the visits you will get are going to be fake, so they will increase your traffic, but they will do so uselessly. It’s not a good idea to get traffic from a website that isn’t well-seen by any search engine, and we’ll discuss that more below. 

3. You’d be going against most search engines’ policies

Not just Google, but also other search engines have strict policies against traffic exchanges. It used to be the same with link exchanges — you could ask a blogger to add a link to their site, and you’d do the same in return. But these days, these practices are heavily frowned upon by Google.

If you use Google Adsense on your blog, you might get your account penalized or banned because of using some of the top traffic exchange sites out there. 

4. Low conversion rate

Whether the visits are automated or there is actual manual traffic exchange involved, it really doesn’t matter since the visitors aren’t going to be interested in your site content. 

They are merely interested in earning the 2 cents that we mentioned previously, so they have a task to complete. It’s just work for them. If you sell products or services on your site, your conversion rate will be extremely low if you resort to using traffic exchange. 

5. You might get spammy backlinks

Think of it this way. Even if the traffic exchange is real and manual, that person who’s going to access your website needs to click on a link to end up in the right place. So that’s how your blog link is going to end up on a potentially shady website. 

Needless to say, all of the backlinks that you will get throughout your blog or site’s life matter a lot when it comes to your rankings. If Google notices that you’re getting backlinks from sites that used to be PBNs or that had suspicious content on them at one point or the other, you might risk being penalized.

And if that happens, you aren’t going to be getting any organic traffic whatsoever. Would you want that? The answer to this question is most likely to be no. 

The bottom line

Since people who work for traffic exchange sites typically visit several websites in just one session, the likelihood of them stopping and actually wanting to read what you had to say in a post is practically non-existent. 

These websites are a waste of time, and to use them, you will also have to pay or visit some sites yourself. You don’t know what you might end up with on your computer if you engage in such activities. 

Instead, focus on writing quality articles and getting backlinks through a variety of tactics that don’t go against any search engine’s policies. Use effective traffic-generation techniques such as direct advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, or social media marketing instead. 

You can even use some CTR manipulation, if you stay on the safe side of things. But in general, traffic exchange sites are useless and will give you lots of headaches in the long run. 

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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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