Paid traffic bad for SEO

[Instanker]

Hi,

Would buying traffic to your website from places like Zeropark or Tonic be bad for your websiteīs SEO?

You basically buy large volumes of cheap traffic but because it is not very targeted it has a very high bounce rate.

Next to this visitors arrive via Popups or Domain redirects which sort of forces visitors to your site instead of getting them organically.

Anyone knows?

[keyplyr]

What would be the point?

[Instanker]

Hi,

The point of what?

[keyplyr]

Buying traffic? Especially if it "is not very targeted and it has a very high bounce rate."

Added...
Hi Instanker, sorry forgot to say welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Guess I don't see why anyone would buy traffic. Also there's the risk of getting a toxic link penalty (not an official penalty but something very real) by being associated with bad neighborhoods that practice these tactics.

[Instanker]

The traffic is not very targeted but it does convert.

So basically you pay for 150 visitors, 1% converts.

The traffic still gives a ROI but only 1 or 2 visitors actually convert.

The rest causes the high bounce rate.

Basically I should have reworded my question.. Does paid traffic / bannering with high bounce rates have an effect on your organic SEO positions.

[not2easy]

forces visitors to your site

Sounds like a great way to make your site unpopular. Why would anyone want to do this?

Imagine having a restaurant and trying to force people into your restaurant. They only thing they would want to do is leave - and possibly report the strongarm tactics.

I can't see it benefiting anyone other than those selling the service.

[Instanker]

You donīt actually force them but they are redirected when they visit expired related domains or they are shown a popunder advert when they visit a certain website.

[not2easy]

If they are being redirected, they did not voluntarily visit your site. They are being forced to visit a place they have not asked to see.

[robzilla]

It doesn't have anything to do with SEO, but I'll assume you mean your search rankings.

I don't think it's likely to affect your rankings, so if you manage to get good ROI out of poor quality traffic, go ahead. Now if you're also running ads on these landing pages, you might run into some trouble. And Zeropark's claim of 400 billion redirects per month seems a bit fishy. That's about 1.77 redirects per day per person alive today. Could be lots of bot traffic.

[Instanker]

Hi,

Yeah I meant my search rankings, with bounce rate, time on site and things like that being taken into account I figured it might have an effect.

I have tried a few of those campaigns and the return is actually not too bad but I am just worried about growing or continueing them as I am worried that they might screw up my organic rankings.

[robzilla]

If that were true, that would be a rather affordable way to hurt a competitor.

[Instanker]

Thatīs true, never thought about that.

Still not very comfortable with sending loads of paid traffic to my site as it will mess up bounces and time on site.

Have done some searches about the topic but it seems it isnīt covered anywhere.

[robzilla]

You could create a separate landing page (or alternative version of the same URL using GET parameters) for paid traffic and split your analytics that way.

[lucy24]

Imagine having a restaurant and trying to force people into your restaurant. They only thing they would want to do is leave - and possibly report the strongarm tactics.

That's an awfully good analogy. Maybe 1% of those forced visitors say Oh, what the heck, I'm hungry, may as well order as long as I'm here ... but it doesn't seem like a terribly viable business strategy. Not even if 1% of these 1% go on to tell their friends about this great new restaurant that they would never have known about if they hadn't been grabbed by the arm and bodily hauled into the premises by a guy in a trench coat.

:: nebulous mental association with hotel touts taking you to places that on rare occasions turn out to be quite decent ::