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October 20, 2004

Traffic Equalizer Review

Posted by Adam Viener

At the Search Engine Strategies convention in San Jose, I heard the term “Ghetto SEO" used to describe the practice of creating pages to get to rankings that were “quick and dirty" without a whole lot of original content.

I had dismissed the term all together, until reading my monthly Planet Ocean Unfair Advantage search engine updates newsletter. In the Q&A section, one of the readers asked “Why is it that so may search engine results-type pages are now ranking high in searches at Google?" Planet Ocean’s response indicated that they are seeing more and more of these sites being removed from Google, but then went on to say the following:

"With reserve we’ll tell you the program that generates these pages is called Traffic Equalizer."

They go on to say that you should be careful about using this type of tool on sites that are deemed permanent since they feel Google will start banning such sites.

I decided it was time to visit the Ghetto and find out what they were talking about. I purchased Traffic Equalizer and played around with the software.

Traffic Equalizer is a piece of html page generation software that takes an html template (either their default templates, or one that you create) and a keyword list and merges the two together to create a site map with links to individual pages that the tool creates for each keyword term in your list. These individual pages can also include a directory style list of other sites that are related to your page that are pulled from 1 of 5 search engine resources. Assuming the template is good, and they placement of your keyword terms are well designed for search engines, they theory is that these pages would rank high.

I’d point you to my sample site that I threw up to test, but I realized that the downside to these sites, is that their structure and sitemap also make your entire keyword list that you are using to generate the site available to all. I did however find an example of a site using the software, I did use the program to add a related sites section to the pages of my Folk Art Site that I created to test out eBay's affiliate editor's kit tool. The site hasn't been doing great, and I figured out a way use the tool to enhance esiting pages and quickly build other artist pages by turing my existing page into a template. I suppose I could have done that by hand, but the tool did save me a lot of time by doing the work for each page and then all I have to do is add the pages to my site archectecture.

In marketing, the theory always goes, test, test, test, and then when you are done testing test some more. Find out what works and keep the good and drop the bad. I do think this is a useful tool, so it’s worth a test. I think you may find a lot more ways to use this type of auto-generation tool, than the specific task it was create for.

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