My Free Traffic System Experiment

Six months ago I tried out a new free system that made outlandish promises to get my website ranked on the first few pages of Google for any search term within ninety days.  I thought that this seemed strange because the competition varies greatly for different keywords.  I also thought it would be stupid to get my website blacklisted for trying something new and may be considered to be black hat SEO by Google.  But I was curious, so I decided to try and promote one of my Squidoo lenses.  If it worked, I would have my answer and my lens would make a little more money.  If it didn’t work, my lens wouldn’t make money online anymore.  I could live with that, so I decided to give it a shot.

The free traffic system is basically an article spinner which submits your articles with your links to 30 different blogs that are affiliated with that system.  The spinner approach is supposed to prevent your articles from being seen as duplicate content.  To make sure that my articles were unique, I would replace words with synonyms and reword sentences.  I didn’t want to take any chances.  It took several hours to get my article completed.  After that I submitted it to the system.  Now it was time to wait.

The keyword I was targeting was residual income online and I was now receiving several visitors per day to the lens.  This was pretty good for me because residual income online is such a competitive term, so I decided to check out how I was doing in the search engines.  My lens was ranked 18 in Yahoo for the keyword and 23 on Alta Vista, but I didn’t even break the top 100 for Google or Bing.  Now I was still getting some Google traffic so I know the lens wasn’t blacklisted.  So what happened? I can’t make money online that way.

I did a little research and looked into some of the websites that my lens was being submitted to and realized that none of them were ranked very highly by Google standards.  They all had a relatively low page rank.  This started to make sense to me because why would an established blog accept spinner articles?  It would be counterproductive and probably drive readers away.  These sites that my article was being submitted to exist primarily to generate Adsense income.

I have come to the conclusion that submitting a spinner article did not hurt my Google rankings, but it didn’t help either.  This experiment confirms the theory that Google pays exponential attention to sites with a high PR.  In other words getting links from 1000 PR 1 sites might not have the same weight as getting a link from 1 PR4 site.

With the time it takes to build one decent spinner article, you could be writing several good guest blogs.  These blogs will send large amounts of traffic to your website through their huge reader base.  Yes you will have to submit quality posts to get accepted to make money online.  But the extra effort could save a lot of heartache.

About The Author

Chris Ruminski has been learning how to make web money since losing his job in Oct 2009. However you should choose to make money online, remember that patience and persistence will dictate the outcome.