Are traffic exchanges (autosurf + manual) bad for my site?

sfidirectory said:

Hi everyone,

When I first got my website (in my sig) up and running, I thought it would be a good idea to join several traffic exchange sites (autosurf, manual surf etc). Heres the thing... I have noticed ever since I have used traffic exchanges my site's bounce rate is climbing, and I know that has to be a bad thing. So I am just waiting for emails from these traffic exchanges so I can quit all the accounts.

Also, what is the point of using autosurf traffic exchanges when no real visitor is likely to actually see your pages, and with manual surf exchanges there probably are bots that can simulate clicks (on shapes to move to the next site etc) to automate the manual surfing.

Since I have created a self hosted Wordpress blog on the site's domain, I can see the bounce rate stabilising (I have linked back to my main site from the blog - in each post).

If anyone knows of some decent free software that can help me get REAL visitors for my site that would be very much appreciated. I am building backlinks and using social networking which is getting me a few visitors, but any other good suggestions will be good also.

Cheers and long live BHW!

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needhits said:

I'm fairly new to this too and did the traffic exchange thing several months ago. Basically what I found is the bounce rate DOES NOT help with rankings etc. (I forget how I found that out). Plus people surfing them are really just trying to get hits to their site. So even if they are viewing manually they'll have another tab open and aren't really seeing your site. It's a zero sum game because that is basically what everyone is doing.

I think the only ones who get any use out of traffic exchanges are other traffic exchanges advertising a "grass is greener " scenario. After little checking it turns out many of them work together.

Take care

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