How Traffic Equalizer Works: An example from my AdSense newsletter

I'm getting ready to release another issue of my AdSense newsletter. Below is an article I published in the last issue to show what you get when you subscribe. The easiest way to subscribe is to sign up for my free mini-book, the two words that can make you rich, my no-nonsense guide to making money with the Internet. Besides the book, you'll get a subscription to my newsletter and a few other bonuses. In any case, enjoy the article… I had exactly one complaint from a reader that I was too soft on the people who use this kind of product, but the point of this article isn't really to judge the usefulness of the technique, only to describe it. Note that as search engines work to integrate “trusted sites” more tightly into their results, these products will become less and less useful over the long term, though they may continue to work as short-term revenue generators.

How Traffic Equalizer Works

If you've been using AdSense for a while, chances are you've heard
of a product called Traffic Equalizer.
As you know, AdSense publishers live and die by the amount of
traffic they get to their sites. You can't make a lot of money
without getting a substantial amount of traffic. This is why
products like Traffic Equalizer (TE for short) exist. They're
in a class of software called “traffic generators”. So how do
these products work?

The process is fairly simple. You register a domain and host
it using a basic web hosting package of some kind. Then you run TE.
It goes and generates hundreds, even thousands, of pages for you
to place on that site. Those pages are all targeted to specific
keyword phrases. You place AdSense ads on those pages and get
them listed in search engines. Then you sit back and watch the
dough roll in.

Alright, it sure sounds simple. So how, exactly, does it work?

The basic idea behind TE and similar products is what I call the
search engine blitzkrieg. You generate a whole pile of simple
pages with content scraped from other sites — oftentimes nothing
but links from the search engines themselves. You make sure that
the pages are generated with good SEO techniques and that each
page targets a specific keyword or keyphrase. (That's why scraping
links from search engine results pages works so well.) You then
get them indexed into the search engines. A significant percentage
of your pages will end up ranking highly (ideally in the first
ten results) in the search engine results for their keyphrases.
Because they rank highly, those pages end up getting traffic
from people searching for those keywords. You make money if any
of those people clicks the ads on the pages.

This is strictly a numbers game, of course. The generated pages
will only rank highly for a certain number of less-competitive
keyphrases, so you need to generate and index a lot of pages
to capture enough traffic to make it worthwhile. But the traffic
you do capture is highly targeted — obviously, they were searching
for something very specific — so the chances are better that
they'll click a well-targeted ad if they end up on one of the
generated pages, which is why an automated system like AdSense
is perfectly suited for this kind of use.

Now, the search engine group within a company like Google doesn't
like these kinds of sites because they're not useful content sites.
These pages only exist to drive traffic to the ads. The advertisers
may not care, actually, if they're being sent well-targeted traffic
that is likely to result in a sale, but that may not sway the
search engine purists. So what happens is that a lot of these
sites end up getting dropped from the search engine indexes because
they're not seen as being useful. In fact, any pages that follow
the same general pattern will get dropped at some point — this is
why users of TE change the default templates that come with TE
in order to avoid (at least temporarily) being caught by the search
engines. (Well, users of TE _should_ make those changes, but I'm
not sure how many do.)

Do TE users care about getting dropped from an index? Not in most
cases, because the dedicated TE user will create multiple sites
with different templates using different domain names hosted by
different hosting companies… so losing one group of pages won't
mean losing the complete income stream.

Of course, TE users are also in competition with each other. If
two TE users are targeting the same niche, which site will get
higher rankings? Probably the site that uses more advanced SEO
techniques to tweak the generated pages even further.

If you're wondering what a TE page looks like, here's an example:

http://www.no-more-spyware.com/resources/eliminate-spyware.html

[In the original newsletter article I also included a
link to a second page, but it's stopped working since then,
probably because someone reported them either to Google or
to their hosting service…]

All I did was a bit of surfing in Google to find these pages, I'm
not associated with them in any way.

AdSense publishers should note that the AdSense program policies
specifically forbid you from placing AdSense ads on pages that
have no content. These kinds of pages probably qualify, though
Google doesn't actually define anywhere what a “content page” is
or is not. If they catch you, they'll probably stop serving ads
to that domain… maybe… they seem inconsistent about it, because
after all they ARE making money from these kinds of pages. (Note
that this is separate from being dropped from the Google index,
which is a different problem.)

So should you use TE to get traffic? I can't really answer that
for you, but I can certainly tell you NOT to place TE-generated
pages on a content-oriented site, otherwise you risk the
entire site getting dropped from search engine indexes. So if
you want to use TE, make sure you put the pages on a separate
domain with a separate IP address.

If you're a good programmer, you could probably come up with
your own page generation software that does what TE does, which
would be easier to customize to escape undue attention.

The ideal solution would be to autogenerate pages with original
content, but that's not possible. Perhaps a semi-generated
system would be better.

Or you could just build sites with good content and go for natural,
long-term traffic growth.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.

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