Why Manual Traffic Exchanges Aren't Good for Your Web Site

Some webmasters may be tempted to use manual traffic exchanges to bring in visitors, these are websites in which the user visits other people's sites in exchange for a visit to their own. Manual traffic exchanges typically use a timer and a browser script which you browse continually through websites that have signed up for the exchange. When you visit the other person's site for a certain amount of time, typically 10-30 seconds, they will in turn visit your site for that same time period. The person doesn't have to actually look at your site, but just stay at your site until the timer is done. Many exchanges have problems with cheaters and bots.

The traffic you get from these sites is of very low quality, most of the users don't even pay attention to your site and probably tab out to another browser until the timer runs out. While the volume of traffic may seem high, virtually none of them have any interest in your site's content and they won't stick around, which just uses up your bandwidth. In most cases these sites are a waste of time and were created to bring in ad revenue by selling banners on the script or in the site rotation.

These sites usually take a lot of time to use as well. You can do an unlimited amount of site visits on most of them, but it's not worth spending hours per day visiting other people's websites just to get very uninterested visitors. If you visited websites for an hour straight at 30 seconds each, you'd have visited 120 websites in that hour and got around that many hits back. There are much better ways of using your time, like creating content for your website or learning about other ways to promote your material.

You should use different tactics to get quality traffic to your website. Some examples are buying advertising to get more traffic to your site or do link exchanges with similar sites. Getting listed on search engines can bring in a lot of quality visitors, and search engines typically look for unique content and sites with a lot of backlinks. Try doing research into Search Engine Optimization(SEO), which is the science of getting better listings on search engines like Google and Yahoo. New webmasters may get frustrated at first because it's hard to bring in traffic, but there are much better options than manual traffic exchanges.