How does Traffic Equalizer work?

This material is adapted from an answer I originally published in my AdSense newsletter. It's not a review of Traffic Equalizer, but an explanation of how it works.

What is Traffic Equalizer?

Website owners know that they need traffic — human visitors — in order to make money from their sites. But random traffic is almost as bad as no traffic. What website owners want is targeted traffic — visitors who are actually looking for the products or services that the website is (directly or indirectly) selling.

Traffic Equalizer (TE for short) is a software product that falls in the class of tools calls "traffic generators". The purpose of a traffic generator is to send traffic (ideally, targeted traffic) to a website.

How Traffic Equalizer Works

TE and similar products like Traffic Hurricane work by generating content-rich pages based on lists of keywords provided by the website owner. These pages, which can number in the hundreds or even thousands, are created automatically by the software using a simple template format. The content of each page is targeted to a single keyword or keyphrase and uses basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure that the pages rank well in search engine results for those keywords/keyphrases. The goal is to get listed in the top ten results for as many of those keywords/keyphrases as possible, thereby ensuring that interested searchers easily find the pages. The generated pages also link back to content on the website, which many of the visitors will explore.

Users of TE can also make money by placing advertisements — such as AdSense ad or link units — on the generated pages.

The Dangers of Using Traffic Equalizer

As you might imagine, the search engines tend to frown on auto-generated content, no matter how "search engine friendly" it is. Sites have been known to be banned from Google for using software like TE, so think carefully before you use it.

If you really want to use TE, be smart about it. Don't put the TE-generated pages on the same site as your content. Put them on a different site, preferably a site with a different IP address hosted by a different hosting company. Then even if your TE-based site gets dropped from a search engine, your main site is probably safe.

Of course, programs like Traffic Equalizer raise interesting ethical questions.