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When anyone publishes articles or poems, or for that matter opinions on the net, it is done to extend one’s views to the general populace, or spread a message on a global scale. Avid bloggers would prefer their works to reach a wider audience base, and try to create a following to cater to.

Be it the interactive inter-web, or the blogosphere, view count and returning audience are the base of the entire juggernaut. The internet is a hard market to cash into, with so much competition from millions of websites. Unless one’s website is so popular so as to attract the attention of the Google’s page rank, one will be left on page two of a Google search, which as someone once said, is the best place to hide dead bodies.

This problem was faced by every person owning a domain before the internet bubble burst, way back in the early 90s, before the advent of Google, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A common solution found for this was to create small traffic analysis bots, and use them to increase traffic to a website using packet data induction or proxy pinging. This is a small idea based on pre-existing traffic analysis tools, contrived to create fake views to the required website. A stream got flooded with random tools popping up all over the internet, and soon there were a plethora of tools claiming to increase one’s web traffic for him. Some websites went a step further, and set up a conglomerate based on these ‘black hat’ techniques.

The first scam is very straightforward. A user downloads a software bot, or spider, which sets up proxy servers and floods his websites with pings, or packet requests. The website owner sees his viewer count rise, and is very glad. Because most people try to earn from their websites by using Google AdSense on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, this should logically be a good sign, right? Not according to a survey conducted by hubpages back in 2011, which stated that while the Alexa rankings of websites saw a rise of at least 1.3 Million on an average when using these traffic bots, they did not affect the individual pages within the website – pages with the actual content.

Now, if any user’s entire purpose of going for these tools was to get quality readership, then he has been cheated. Payments made by AdSense are dependent on actual users clicking on their advertisements, or actually visiting the page, which in this case has not happened. So all that has transpired, is that the website administrator ended up shelling 5$ or 10$ for a software to give his blog or website 10000 unique views, except it did not help his cause at all.

Back linking pages has been an established means of increasing web traffic. This means is based on cooperation between websites. If a person’s website is based on a certain genre, then he can go to forums also based on the same topic, and comment his opinions there, with backlinks to his site. This spurs readers to visit his website too. A neat trick, except it takes a bit of effort. Now, if a web service guarantees to do this entire grunt work for the user; If it claimed to provide the service for a small amount, like easyhits, or for free, like Wahora, 2Leep, or MGID, wouldn’t a user not jump at that tempting an offer? This is the beauty of the second con.

Let’s take a company that claims to have the largest audience development network in the world, MGID, as an example, and see what they claim to provide to the public. They claim to be part of a network of over 17,000 sites. Thus the implication is that they offer prospective clients traffic from all of them. The scheme itself is simple. They give the admin a widget to add on to his blog, or website, which has links to their websites and featured pages. In turn, they guarantee to post widgets prepared by their “experts” of his website on those of their network partners. Alternatively the admin can submit widgets he wants to be posted too. It’s simple, isn’t it? They guarantee as much as 1000-1500 exclusive users every day. Sounds tempting, right?

The con itself is simple. There are no experts who put up the target website’s widgets on other websites. The user’s website ends up with a widget that has links to the host site only, not to any of the other 17,000 members of this network. MGID uses the traffic generation bots to create proxy servers, to simulate hits from all around the world on the target’s site. It wouldn’t be a shot in the dark if all of the 17,000 members of this network were users who wanted to increase the audience to their websites. That means that they get actual traffic to its own site from 17,000 websites while in return they provide fake hits on each of the 17,000 websites from the traffic generation bots. It turns out to be a con of gargantuan proportions. Even those users, who are careful enough to make their own widgets, can only submit it to the website itself, not see it actually put up on any other website.

One can use these software scripts and these websites to increase traffic enough to attract advertisers. But since payment from advertisers is dependent on click-through to their sites, it will be hard when none of those ‘visitors’ are real. And when the visitor to clicking ratio turns out to be so skewed, they will walk away.

Then how do the owners improve the viewership to their websites? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the answer to this. Tagging one’s articles with key words so that Google or any other site can easily pick it up is the easiest way to publicize one’s website. This allows people searching for information to find the blog or site on their own. In addition to the back linking forum work mentioned above, Search Engine Optimization allows admins to get quality traffic for their quality work.