Traffic trading will NOT get you banned from AdSense

[woochoo]

Some people after reading the AdSense TOS come to think that traffic trading is against their TOS and will get you banned. This post is to explain why that is not true and what that section of their TOS actually refers to.

Definitions and descriptions:
Legitimate visitors - A real life visitor that is, or with high certainty is, interested in the service/product your site offers. This visitor was NOT offered anything (gift, money, traffic to their site) in exchange for visiting your site.

Traffic Trading - An agreement between 2 or more sites to send legitimate visitors to a site to each other in exchange for them sending legitimate visitors back to your site.

Link Exchange - A form of trading traffic but with some SEO benefit. Lately these have become more for SEO then for trading traffic though. The link is not paid for.

Banner Exchange - Like Link Exchanging but uses image banners and has no SEO benefit. This is often done buy a 3rd-party service that provides stats and banner management. It is used only for trading traffic and in some cases a small amount of branding. This can be done without the 3rd party and can be just between a 2 sites.

Traffic Exchange - This is done through a 3rd-party service where all members are webmasters, site owners, and/or paid by a site owner to be active in the service and promote their site. This is for trading non-legitimate visitors to boost site traffic and ad clicks. In order to earn a visit to your site you have to visit another members site. This is incentivized traffic and none of the people you get to visit your site from this service will have been interested in looking around. Many of these services are click based and ask all members to click a few ads on each site before they close them. That is click fraud and any ad network will ban your in a second if they find out you do this. To make this easier to understand... Traffic Exchange services are like digg and stumble exchanges. Digg and StubleUpon ban you if they find out you trade diggs/stumbles because it is spamming and not really entered due to legitimate interest in your site/article/game. That is the same reason and same theory behind Traffic Exchanges.

All of the above are perfectly fine ways to boost traffic EXCEPT using Traffic Exchanges. I know "trading" and "exchanging" by dictionary definitions are the same. But in the way those terms are used on the web they are completely different. The section in Google AdSenses TOS that causes some people to think that trading traffic is not ok is actually just about traffic and click exchange services.

[FoxyGamers]

This is really great information to know since i run an arcade banner exchange website and i get asked this all the time.

[woochoo]

A lot of my customers used to ask this all the time. I barely get asked since I put this post up. When ever you get asked you can link here to paste the info in the email. Might even get asked less if you link to it from your site.

[FoxyGamers]

If anyone asks i would be more than happy to link here, If i get around to adding more pags of information to my excahnge would it be alright if i copied the information and placed a link below it?

[woochoo]

That is perfectly fine with me.

[geeman01]

Thanks for the info.

So buying traffic from arcade exchange networks like gamecetera.com, arcadebanners.com, gamesbannerexchange.com is bad?

[woochoo]

No, because they send real, interested visitors. They do not ask you personally to visit other members sites in exchange for traffic in return. You put the banner up to send real visitors, that aren't you or people you know, in exchange for real visitors to your site.

The word 'exchange' isn't the key distinction. The way the traffic is earned and received is. If you personally are asked to visit 30 other peoples websites in exchange for 30 visits from other members then you are in a bad service. Banner exchanges (trustworthy ones at least) are the same as Google Ads, but are paid for by putting the code on your site. If you buy traffic from the sites you listed you are essentially doing the same as advertising on a real ad network like Google AdWords.

Some examples of Traffic Exchanges (the ones to stay way from) can be found at: http://www.trafficexchangelist.com/

Additionally click exchange sites are even worse. They are basically the same set up as a traffic exchange but instead of just exchanging visitors you are asked to click the Google, VCM, Yahoo, MSN, etc ads on each site you visit. This is called click fraud and is illegal to all ad networks.

Here is more information on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_exchange