Traffic-Bug – A Borderline Spam Tool?

Do any of you folks use Traffic-Bug? With hesitation, I started to use it when it first was introduced. I will tell you why I was hesitant, but first I want to tell you what it does.

Traffic-Bug is an automated tool to help build backlinks. For your root domain, you can add an entry into the Traffic-Bug system, decide on the aggression level, and it will:

• Submit your site to every imaginable search engine
• Submit your site to heaps of free directories
• Submit your site to heaps of Social Bookmarking sites
• Submit your RSS feed to heaps of RSS directories (tip: if you do not have a feed for your site, you can easily create one free here: http://www.feedage.com/html2rss/)
• Ping your feed

For deep linking, it will Social Bookmark your pages when they are added individually. Also, you can bookmark articles or other content of yours from 3rd party sites, plus of course submit the RSS feed of your 3rd party accounts.

My initial problem with the tool? Well, the people I learned about it from, the 30DC guys, well, I used to be a member of a membership site, the Immediate Edge, where a lot of the same guys from 30DC would be doing the teaching. In the Immediate Edge, they taught that there were only a handful of Social Bookmarking sites that offered any value anymore, namely Digg, Delicious, Propeller and StumbleUpon. Also, they suggested that free directories were a waste of time now. They felt that DMOZ was the ONLY directory to bother with. OK, that makes the directory and SB part of the submission tool useless right? Now, what about categories for RSS sites and the free directories for that matter? Unless Traffic-Bug has an amazing category mapping strategy in place and keeps on top of it constantly, how can it know what categories it submits our content to? Well, their answer was they do a best match based on the content submitted and the category. It has improved but it still only works half-assed in my opinion. In the beginning, I was having a lot of sites being denied by directories for being submitted to the wrong categories, but some have accepted my content even though the category was way off. Also, do the other search engines matter, besides the top 3? I didn’t really give much thought to them before so I didn’t really know.

Well, despite all of the negativity I associated to this tool, I tried it anyways because it was free at first as part of the 30DC. By the time the free trial was up it was still too early to tell if it was effective, and I already had time invested in my submissions so I signed up. It was a cheap introductory rate so I figured what the hell. I know a lot of you are probably thinking “SUCKER” and I kind of felt the same way, that I was getting sucked in.

I worried most that Traffic-Bug was really just spamming directories, but then I learned that directory owners were begging to be let in the automated system. They wanted to receive the automated content from Traffic-Bug to help populate their sites! So clearly they weren’t looking at it as spam. Plus, the categorization issue has improved like I said.

What about results? Well, my sites have jumped in rank during the time I have been with Traffic-Bug, but I have been continuing my efforts with blog content syndication and article marketing, etc. at the same time so it’s tough to say if it helped with that at all. I do see traffic show up in Google Analytics from little known search engines and some social bookmarking sites that were never there before so I can likely attribute that to Traffic-Bug.

I still manually do some submissions (or pay for manual submission). I submit my RSS feeds to Feedage.com and Feedagg.com on my own still and leave the rest to Traffic-Bug. I have my site submitted to the top 100 SEO directories found on info.vilesilencer.com as well, plus I do a couple (very few) social bookmarks.

The thing with Traffic-Bug is, for what it’s worth, I’m comforted to know that something is hammering away tirelessly in the background to promote my sites for me when I’m slacking or sleeping or whatever. And the price is right for what it does.

Traffic-Bug Suggestions

I do have some suggestions for Michael and the crew over there.

1. Add spinning capabilities for more unique content. It’s great that we can add, what is it, 5 or 6 different versions for the titles and description, but I’d personally rather use JetSpinner syntax to help make all the submissions unique. Would that even matter or is it too much work? I don’t know to be honest, but there’s just something about having the same version of something all over the web pointing back to my site that I don’t like.
2. Enhance the RSS feed submission capabilities. What would be great is if it a) when the feed was first added, give you the option to let it grab each piece of content, come up with a few auto-summaries and add it to the system for social bookmarking and b) keep an eye on the feed and grab each new piece of content it sees, come up with a few auto-summaries and add it to the system for social bookmarking and c) auto-ping the feed when the content is new. Now we’re talking!