May 14 2012

Too Much of a Good Thing – Traffic You Don’t Want

If you run a website then probably a large portion of your time is spent trying to get people to go there and to this end you are probably trying desperately to collect as many links as possible and to promote in every way you can think of. This results in a kind of scatter gun strategy where you just throw as many links out there as possible and hope that a few stick. Likewise you’ll attract all kinds to your website which will result in your numbers going up.

However ‘numbers going up’ isn’t necessarily always a good thing, and it’s not just about the number of people you attract to your website or blog, but also the quality of those visitors. Ultimately though it may sound counterintuitive there are visitors that you don’t want to come to your website. Here we will look at how this can be.

A Drain on Resources

Business schools teach that not all clients are necessarily good clients. Let’s say you provide advertising for businesses and your customers pay a monthly fee in order for you to design adverts for them and then place them in your magazine. Now good clients will pay you that monthly fee and be happy with the results. Great clients will maybe increase their orders over time, and fantastic clients will be happy with what you do so much so that they encourage other people to sign up to your services.

However you’ll also get bad clients, and these will be the people who complain and find fault in all your adverts. Or even like them but just want too tight a control over how they look and when they appear. You’ll find they send you hundreds of e-mails and this will mean that your ‘communications overhead’ increases. In other words you’ll spend so long communicating with this client and keeping them happy, and so long tweaking and redesigning their advert (even though you likely know best seeing as its your field) that you won’t be able to serve as many others. In short they are a drain on resources and they aren’t earning their keep. Now the very smart businesses will even use a ‘filter’ to deflect those customers away from their services, and the even smarter ones will recommend those clients to their competition. Crafty.

Obviously if your website is a business site that you are using to promote a product or service then such people will still exist and you will want to direct them away from your page lest they want to do business with you However even if your blog is just a blog, you can still get analogous situations.

Un-Targeted Traffic

You may for instance have heard of ‘quality’ traffic. The quality of your traffic basically refers to the amount of time that your visitors stay on your page, and the number of adverts they click/products they buy. If they are coming to your site and spending two seconds there before leaving then they don’t want to be there and as such you don’t want them there. They are a drain on resources in so much as you will have  more of a toll on your bandwidth, but they will also likely be wasted links if you are only getting that kind of traffic from there.

If ever you have tricked someone into coming to your website -by misleading them in your link for example – then you don’t need or want that traffic. Likewise if you redirected them, brought them there through an unrelated image search etc. Avoid this by posting links only on relevant sites and with relevant and informative anchor text.

And then of course is the other unwanted traffic – spam bots which take a toll not only on your bandwidth but also on your time spent moderating comments and forum posts.

So next time you post a ink in a desperate bid to get someone to your site, think: do you really want the kind of traffic that link will bring you? (And remember… Google is watching!)

Jeet is an internet marketer and blogger. He writes about blogging, seo, Google and other internet related topics.

One Response to “Too Much of a Good Thing – Traffic You Don’t Want”

  1. Bruce Barker says:
    May 16, 2012 at 4:40 am

    A salutory reminder to us relative “newbies” to the “blogosphere” not to get carried away with our backlinking efforts. My own mentor has stressed that both content and linking must all be “relevant”.