I noticed more and more people talk about it as a method of driving traffic. Back where I come from, ref spamming has only been seen as a method of getting some permanent backlinks in some stats pages. But people want referer spam traffic. My question is:
Is this traffic worth the trouble?
It's like porn traffic: Huge but pretty much worthless.
Pretty consistently and I do visit those sites. My visits last .5 seconds while I look for my link. If I don't find it I simply label the spammer as a crappy individual, send a couple of bad words his way and carry on. Do I visit those sites? NEVER! During my entire history one ref spam page appealed to me.
I pretty much don't think so except some internet marketing niches and so on. When you ref spam you actually 'contact' website owners. I wouldn't bet on them as customers to regular products so I'd say they're more inclined to the virtual side of the world. That's why I think referer spamming only has success in our niche.
I'm starting an experiment. I want to test the quality of referer spam traffic as I don't believe in it. I want to see if they even read a page and it they're willing to optin a list. Hell, I'll even give them the option to comment and flame my sorry ass for doing this to them.
This page will appear in your blogs referer traffic pretty soon. I'll be running 100.000 - 250.000 distinct hosts (subdomains) (if it works fast I might go to 1.000.000) within the next few hours and I'll stamp all of them with this page as refferer.
All blogs will appear in internet marketing / seo related searches in the search engines but I'll also go deeper on all of them. I'll only mark blogs. I'll check for Pingback header first. No non-blog host will be marked.
As you see I don't have ads here. But I'll see how many visit, how many comment and how many actually optin or subscribe RSS. And any Alexa traffic rank fluctuations. Maybe it'll create brand awareness (I h8 fancy terms).
And best of all I'll have full disclosure on the numbers. I'll tell you exactly the traffic and their reactions but the comments will be visible here.
PS: If your blog/site got in my firerange and you feel offended do accept my sincere appologies for crapping your your stats informations. If you can find the inner strength to forgive me you might find some useful stuff on this site.
2008-07-11 Well ... during two thirds of a day got about 50 visits and 6 new subscribers… which is not that bad. I crawled over 300.000 pages and finished hitting 15.000 distinct blogs (checked for X-Pingback header) so I guess more visits should arrive within the next few days. I have over 250.000 URLs in queue and I'll do another set today and keep you updated.
