do automatic website traffic generators work?

[Christopher]

hello. can anyone tell me if these automatic website generators really work? i've seen these advertised and i've seen ads on ebay, offering, say, 10000 unique visitors to your website. my website seems to be going nowhere so i'm looking at other ways. also, can anyone tell me if they are adsense safe? thanks.

[Steve]

They may provide 10,000 unique visits, but it won't be the type of traffic you want. If you are selling something or providing information your best source of traffic is via search engines of advertising, that way the visits are from people that are looking for a site like yours and will be interested in the content. 10,000 forced visits, or just visits by a non-human bot will be about as useful as a chocolate teapot I'm afraid. If you want more genuine traffic you have to look into SEO or advertising your site. There is no shortcut to getting the type of traffic that can benefit your website, or that will make you any money via adsense.

[Techxan]

First off, if you buy traffic at all, and Google finds out that you did it while you were running their ads, they will ban you and keep your money. And they will find out.

There are benefits to buying traffic. If you buy traffic from these providers, it will be bulk, untargeted traffic, quite likely from overseas.

This traffic typically will not stay on your site very long. This will drive your website traffic stats up and helps your rankings. This may be a good thing, but the rate at which they leave your site is important too, and a bunch of people leaving your site right after getting there is not good (this is called your bounce rate). You have to balance the good against the bad, to see if it works out for you.

(For instance, if you were going to build an entertainment blog, you might buy traffic for a year so it has a clear record of people visiting. During this time you also promote the business and gain your own traffic. As your generic traffic grows, you back off on the paid traffic. This still keeps your traffic stats up, but as your add more real visitors, they will stay on your site longer. This will decrease your bounce rate over time and force it to go down. The effect after a year is your site will have a history of good traffic and steadily decreasing bounce rate, an indicator if a good site for the search engines to see.)

If you were to have a product that was so catchy or unique that everyone who sees it would buy it, driving this traffic to a page about it might pay off. In that case, you would build the site specifically to attract these visitors, not to satisfy Google.

Another way to use traffic is to participate in traffic exchanges. These sites give you credit for visiting other sites, and then you use the credits to have people visit your site. I do not wast my time with them.

I do use link collider (http://www.linkcollider.com) for social media exposure, it is free and you should check it out.

[Sam Little]

It will be one time visits and that will basically boost a page count but do nothing for you in the long run.

[RubiChili]

They're probably not working. if you wanna buy traffic, try google adwords, facebook ads or search google for a real traffic source.

If you wanna generate traffic your self (free, but will cost you time), here's a few tips for you:

- Social networking: participate in forums, facebook, twitter, google +, youtube, digg etc.
- do email marketing. Build your list and send useful info to your subscribers
- content marketing: write useful articles and provide your visitors with good info
- SEO optimize your site and get traffic from the search engines
- viral marketing: write an ebook with your links and give it away for free