Probably unethical way any domain can skyrocket in rankings.

[nameboi]

I just figured out someting very interesting I would like to ask the opinions of the experts here.

Check out publiboda.com. It's a Spanish-language directory of wedding-related businesses with very high Alexa ranking. I just checked Quantcast for publiboda.com and arecetas.com has the highest affinity. Whois for publiboda.com and arecetas.com show the same person, who also owns infopeople.com.

Arecetas.com is a free recipes site. Free recipes sites can easily get high traffic, but the value of that traffic is almost zero as people just want free recipes.

But arecetas.com hosts images that are pulled from publiboda.com server. On every arecetas.com page (other than home page) the second large horizontal image is pulled from publiboda.com server.

Am I correct in saying that every time someone goes to arecetas.com and sees image from publiboda.com server, that inflates publiboda.com stats?

If it's that easy, then why not contact websites with crazy high stats that are launched with viruses like degrees.info, and why not pay them to include a tiny image hosted on your site. So if degrees.info has 1 million US monthly visitors, your brand new site about some high value subject like finance or insurance will have the same high traffic stats after a couple of months of including your image on the high-traffic site.

What I wrote above will of course not help you make any money with PPC as there is no real traffic, but it can help you sell ads directly. Publiboda can say to their advertisers - look at our high Alexa, but what percentage of their Alexa stats is from images hosted on other sites like arecetas.com?!

Please let me know if I am missing something here and way off base with what I wrote.

 

[Meongtae]

i have wondered the exact same thing. I hope someone chimes in to answer this. Thanks for the post nameboi.

 

[eFingerz]

im no expert but i think it will only show as file request not unique visitors

 

[nielsencl]

Yeah, they will be counted as users where the images are pulled, but the only benefit may be boosting Alexa scores a little. And there are other ways to do that that work better I think.

But if you want to "inflate" the stats to a buyer is impressed, that may work, but yes, that would not be ethical if you don't tell them and they should realize that you are not making the kind of money you should for the "traffic" you are getting...

 

[MicroGuy]

The "probably" could have been left off this thread title. IMO.

 

[copper]

This is exactly what's happening with one of my domain which is image and file hosting.

Last Month, it got 107,117 uniques. That's 3,570/day uniques.
This Month until now, it got 58,425. That's 4,494/day uniques.

Some sites uploaded song and linking to my site.

I am debating what I should do atm.
Trying to figure out if there is any way to monetize.

A couple years ago, I had a motorcycle related business site that I kept a bunch of personal, "Napster borrowed" .mp3 files in a sub directory of the root.

Well I put some of those mp3's in a player on a MySpace page I had at the time - and anybody that linked to those mp3's did count as visitors to that motorcycle website traffic. LOL. To the tune of over 2,000 uv's a day. It happened to be that the mp3 songs were really hard to find, and people must have found them in my music player and hotlinked them in their music players.

When I sold that "motorcycle" related company, I explained what was going on with the website traffic, but they weren't listening. They were soooo about the fact that the website had over 2,000 UV's a day, they didn't want to listen.

I think you have a lot of that happening today on website stats - and a good black hat domainer would know how to play that card - of course it would leave the buyer standing at the door with his **** in his hand so it's not a good business practice, but it's happening all around us. They're "real" stats looking at one side of the coin, but "fake" on the other.

Buyer beware - it happens everyday.

L2