Don’t always believe the stats web publishers quote when trying to persuade you how busy their sites are – there are some dishonest publishers out there…

Firstly let me point out categorically that I NEVER employ this (or any other underhand) technique. The stats quoted here come from a project I have under development and this was done purely to illustrate this article.

If I was trying to sell you advertising or an affiliate scheme of some sort, this would look pretty impressive wouldn’t it? Really, it’s not. It’s a very simple deception technique used by unscrupulous web site owners.

Now – how did we take a site from 16 page views to over 9,000 in less than 48 hours?

Simple – I bought the hits from a website – for $9.99. There are a number of sites where you can do this, and on some you can even set a daily rate (which if you are using this to be deceptive) which you can control to show an upward trend – one such site is “Visitor Boost” (www.visitorboost.com)

The thing to note – is that hits from this type of source are worthless. In this instance, I haven’t shown you – quite deliberately of course – the vast majority came from China, so even if they were real and not just automated or users tricked onto the site by some means – they would not be able to read your content anyway!

There’s four reason people might use this…

1. They are stupid, and believe they are buying genuine, worthwhile, human visitors

2. To improve their rank on the Alexa website (or similar sites) that measure sites by traffic rather than more thorough means

3. An SEO company can use tools like this to deceive less knowledgeable clients and impress them with improved performance

4. Most commonly, a small web site owner hoping to sell ad space can create charts like the one above to deceive prospects. Picture a site with 200 visitors a day (or even less), if the owner was to ‘buy’ 1000 hits a day they have a chart which has 1200 hits a day (and they only need to do this for a week or a month occasionally to get a nice print out for their sales folder. Simple, but very effective to a potential client with little or no understanding of the internet.

So – next time contacts you selling advertising or some get rich quick scheme – don’t take their impressive statistics as gospel.

Here’s a couple of things that you should be aware of…

1. The term hits means files loaded which includes images and other files – each page can contain many items. For instance a hundred hits a day could simply be a couple of pages viewed!

2. Unique visitors, is exactly what it says – as is page loads. The ratio of visitors to page loads is crucial – lets say a site gets 1000 visitors a day and 1000 page loads, it means that anyone who his getting to the site is jumping off right away, they are not reading the content. If its 1000 visitors to 10,000 page loads – obviously users are finding the content useful as they are reading 10 pages each.

3. Ask where the hits come from geographically?

4. Ask where the inbound links in come from – they should be from quality sites – not “I’ll click yours if you click mine” type sites like Twitter!

It’s a simple thing. Statistics, charts and spurious numbers look great – but they can be formed and twisted to say whatever the person trying to impress you wants to say if they are less than scrupulous!

Ask questions!

And the big question is – have you ever heard of the site before that email arrived in your inbox?

Related posts:

1. PeopleString – can you actually make money from a social network site?
2. Ashley and Me
3. Fake Internet Guru’s…

One Response to “The easy way to increase hits on your site!”