Is using Traffic Equalizer ethical?
As I mentioned a couple of days ago in How does Traffic Equalizer work?, the latest issue of my newsletter includes a discussion of how programs like Traffic Equalizer (which is not cheap, by the way, the current version retails for $147!) work to generate traffic. One of my readers wrote to complain that I'd been too soft on Traffic Equalizer (TE). Let me quote the relevant part of the email:
I'm sorry to see you talking about programs such as Traffic Equalizer in such a positive light. These are nothing but webspam generators that pollute the internet and make it more difficult to find legitimate content. To me this is the equivalent of littering. I would assume you wouldn't talk about a litter generator so positively.
As readers of this blog and/or my book know, personally I think that the best long-term strategy is organic growth through good content. Look at a site like Ask Dave Taylor, for example, which is essentially a blog where fellow writer Dave Taylor answers random technical questions sent to him by his readers. There is a lot of content on that site, and Dave has carefully tweaked his pages to be search-engine friendly and able to make some good money via AdSense from it.
The problem with the organic content approach, of course, is that it takes time to bear fruit. Dave Taylor did not come up with all that content overnight. Not everyone wants to wait as long, or work as hard, to build that kind of a high-volume site. So if making money online is your primary goal, you end up looking at two basic strategies:
- Building dozens, possibly hundreds, of targeted niche sites
- Using “traffic catchers” like TE
The guys who are really making a LOT of money end up combining the two strategies. It's a numbers game, of course, because you make money based on your conversion ratio (the percentage of people that click ads) and the easiest way to make more money is simply to get more traffic — as long as it's the right kind of traffic, of course. (See my free little e-book for more details on this topic.)
Truth be told, I'm not sure how many of the really big online money-makers use TE specifically, but in talking to a few of them I'd say that most of them have some way to generate content pages in one form or another. You almost have to do it if you're looking for traffic breadth, as opposed to traffic depth. The problem with that approach is that they generate pages that don't really have any content in them, and yes, that does “pollute the Internet” and causes the search engines to work hard at detecting and removing those kinds of pages from their indexes. The best money-makers realize this and use a semi-generated approach, mixing in new content with generated content to get the best of both worlds.
The true purists would argue that search engine optimization techniques — even a lot of the basic stuff covered here and in my book — are also unethical. But we, as AdSense publishers, spend a lot of time tweaking our content and our site/blog layouts to make sure that our pages end up ranking as highly as they can in search engine results.
In the end, you just have to draw a line in the sand and stick by it. There will always be programs like TE around and Google and the others will always be fighting them to some degree. It's entirely up to you to decide if you want to use those kinds of tools or not. People like to characterize SEO techniques as “whitehat” and “blackhat”, but the reality is that there's a “grayhat” spectrum between them that most of us use at one time or another. It's a bit of a slippery slope.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.