Toplists!

[goldengob]

Can anyone give me any pointers on how to get high in toplists. I have my own toplist and its plain obvious that most of the sites are cheating. A few of the sites that rank high don't even have links on their pages, so where does all their traffic come from? Is there a code to use or something to rank high?
Its about time I had a piece of this pie :)

Thanks!

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Hi, what are toplists?

Perhaps they are buying traffic. Do toplists base traffic soley on traffic?

[BradleyT]

They're probably using IFrames. Check your weblogs to see where all the hits are coming from.

[goldengob]

what are iframes

[Iguana]

To rank high on Toplists, you traditionally had a program that pinged the page with the referrer set to your own page. Nowadays, nearly all of them have anti-cheat mechanisms, using cookies, unique ip addresses, and even lists of public proxies.

I suspect that some of the 'cheating' is actually done with the approval of the toplists owner - maybe in return for a link or because they own the site as well.

I actually end up with legit links from a toplist on a PR6 index page because of the traffic I send them - but I've never noticed any particular boost to my sites rankings because of it.

[BradleyT]

I haven't done anything with toplists in about 5 years so I'm pretty far out of the loop.

However Iframes allow you to open up another website in a 1x1 pixel on your website. So here's how they cheat you:

On their site (or some busy site) they put a 1x1 IFrame with the url source set the to topsite url that gets them a vote. So every time their page is loaded it looks like they sent a hit to your topsite but the surfer could never view your site because it was in a 1x1 frame.