Forums with huge amounts of visitors - Fake ?

[RiverWire]

ive seen alot of new forums lately with 300 - 400 visitors, this must be paid traffic or a mod which is giving fake visitors, i check the sites regulary to see if there is new members etc but there isnt. What is the point of this ? i would imagine most people would look at it and think FaKE users straight away and leave

What do you think ?

[Midwest]

There's no point in faking your websites'/forums'/blog's traffic..at least in my opinion. And I have absolutely no idea why some people are doing this. I mean yeah, you might leave a good impression at first, but then your visitors will eventually notice you're just cheating and will probably never return to your forum...

[Asad]

Actually, the visitors come for there solutions or information. So, a forum may get a lot of visitors, but, not registered members. If you still don't believe it, then, Have a try at Qdoos.

Don't let the unregistered users read the posts and threads. Just place the REGISTER link at the posts and ask them to register to read the post. I am sure that you will get more than 100 members per week!!!

[hitman]

it could just be they installed something so they get more crawls from spiders, i tried it till i realised it had no use and jsut sucked up bandwidth really.


riverwire, why not try this, make it so that visitors can only see 50% of posts in each thread, but dont make it so you can only see the first thread, as ive seen many forums do that and it just annoys me

[RiverWire]

Na im pretty sure they are fake numbers not even interested visitors, im also not a fan of covering up posts to unregistered users, its a fast way to slow down crawl rate and not get good serps for long tail keywords

[Iearn-Money]

There is a mod for vBulletin forums allow you to add a fake number of visitors to your online users in your forum, even add fake members are like online but once you click on their usernames you see their status is offline..

This feature was abused by forum admins to attract more advertisers, some of them fell in this case and buy advertissment packages, so the forum admin earns by cheating!

It doesn't help him to make his forum bigger and bigger but only fool advertisers to earn.

[RiverWire]

yeah i dont believe in that type of thing at all, if you do it the right way i.e advertising and SEO the results are better long term

[Iearn-Money]

Originally Posted by RiverWire

yeah i dont believe in that type of thing at all, if you do it the right way i.e advertising and SEO the results are better long term

I agree with that, there is lots of tricks by webmasters to attract advertisers, such as autosurfs traffic, alexa trick, keywords abuse... You can get advertisers however you haven't this big website, but real visitors, the advertisers will earn traffic too by their clicking, if it was fake users/visitors they won't click any click

[zinruss]

I believe those traffic is from paid to click, paid to read, paid to surf etc etc. Addditional, some new board owner will modify the source code in order to have

Currently Active Users: xxx ( x members and xxx guests)

If x is zero and less than 10, then i believe they are using semi-blackhat technique.

Just my 2 cents.

[masterweb]

Well to be honest sometimes members register at my forum just to send their sites to the link directory into the board, download some free resources available there or even to spam other members via PM, but believe me are real persons even if they doesn't post!.