The Follies of Traffic Driving
Imagine a busy street in the city with sidewalks packed with pedestrians. Hundreds of people are pushing and shoving, eating, arguing, talking on their cell phones and not paying any attention to each other. Suddenly, one of them stops and looks up, as if he was trying to see something on the roof of the nearby skyscraper. Shielding his eyes with a newspaper from the glare of the afternoon sun, he stares intently at the penthouse level of the giant building.
Shortly, the man is joined by another passer-by and then another. A few minutes later a small crowd forms on the side of the street and everybody is looking up. Now people are even pointing at something near the top of the building. The crowd grows and someone calls the fire department. Why else would a crowd of people be standing in the middle of the street staring at the roof of a building unless there was a fire? A police patrol notices the commotion and stops by to investigate. Now everyone on the street sees a police cruiser surrounded by a crowd of people and imagines a gruesome crime has been committed. They approach for a closer look.
What did the man see on the roof of the building? Nothing. Since early morning his neck was cramping up. He stopped and raised his head to relieve the tension. He was not looking at anything: he covered his eyes with a newspaper. The man is now long gone, but the crowd is still there, staring at the building. Someone says that there was a jumper on the ledge, but he now went inside. Police patrolman gets on the radio and calls for backup and a negotiator.
Traffic driving is the covert art of artificially inflating traffic to a Web site to increase the site’s apparent popularity and, hopefully, attract some real visitors. Indeed, if you think there is a popular site out there, you would want to check it out. It’s only gonna take a minute and won’t cost you any money, so why not? So how does one go about boosting fake traffic to one’s site? The process is not complicated:
1. Get a large list of free public HTTP proxies
2. Compile a list of URLs from your site
3. Using each proxy, visit a few URLs
4. ???
5. Big profit!
Of course, to do this on any significant scale, some automation is in order. Perhaps a script that will download proxy lists from various sites, download the list of URLs from your site and then automatically visit these URLs using the each proxy server. Here is a very basic example of a Unix shell script that will go through a list of proxies and URLs and launch the browser to access each URL through each proxy (there is a plugin available for Firefox that automatically sets the browser proxy to the http_proxy environment variable):
#!/bin/ksh cat proxy_list.txt | while read proxy do export http_proxy=$proxy cat url_list.txt | while read url do firefox "$url" & done sleep 60 killall firefox done
Unfortunately, when you do something like this, the resulting traffic does not look very natural. Indeed, it would seem rather strange that every visitor to your site is accessing the same URLs and in the same order. Search engines don’t look kindly on this sort of shenanigans and your site may get banned. Here is an example of bad traffic driving: below is a traffic chart from one of the blogs listed on BlogTopSites.com:
Notice the suspiciously uniform gap between the number of unique visitors and the number of hits. This is exactly what you would expect to see when some script is used to access the same URLs through each proxy. Such a uniform pattern is unnatural because it is highly improbable that every visitor to your site will click on the same number of links. What you need to do is to access a random number of URLs from each proxy:
#!/bin/ksh maxurls=$(echo "`expr $RANDOM % 15 `+1"|bc -l) proxies_total=$(wc -l /tmp/traffic_builder_proxylist.txt | awk '{print $1}') maxproxies=$(echo "`expr $RANDOM % $proxies_total`+1"|bc -l) cat /tmp/traffic_builder_proxylist.txt | while read proxy do echo "`expr $RANDOM % $proxies_total`^$proxy" done | sort -n | sed 's/[0-9]*^//' | head -${maxproxies} | \ while read random_proxy do export http_proxy=$random_proxy urls_total=$(wc -l /tmp/traffic_builder_sitemap.txt | awk '{print $1}') urls_to_visit=$(echo "`expr $RANDOM % $maxurls`+1"|bc -l) cat /tmp/traffic_builder_sitemap.txt | while read url do echo "`expr $RANDOM % $urls_total`^$url" done | sort -n | sed 's/[0-9]*^//' | head -${urls_to_visit} | \ while read random_url do firefox "$url" & done sleep 60 killall firefox done
In this example, we set the maximum number of URLs ($maxurls) to visit between 1 and 15. Then we randomize the list of proxies and pick a random number of proxies from 1 to the maximum available. We use each selected proxy to visit a random number of URLs from 1 to $maxurls. The URLs themselves are picked at random as well. We will not be going into the number theory or discussing how random is “random”, but instead we will assume that it is random enough for our humble purposes.
By running this script in a loop, you will ensure there is no easily discernible pattern in your traffic stats. Let’s say we have a list of 99 proxies (proxy_list.txt) and a list of 99 URLs (url_list.txt) from your site. Running the script above once per day for a month may result in the following traffic stats:
As you can see, we got rid of the conspicuous parallel movement of the two lines showing visitors and hits. Obviously, the number of hits will still depend on the number of visitors, as it very well should. This dependency, however, will appear less robotic and more human. And that’s the goal.
In the end you need to understand that traffic driving is a gimmick, a makeshift tool that is barely usable. The main objective is to create real traffic, not fake. By trying to trick some search engine or directory, you will end up skewing your own stats and will lose track of what’s real and what’s imaginary. Spend more of your time and effort to generate real content that will attract real people. Otherwise, you risk believing in your own lies.
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