Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Research & Trends
    3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    4. Traffic exchange referral URL's

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Traffic exchange referral URL's

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    3
    3
    1386
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Teamzig
      Teamzig last edited by

      We have a client who once per month is being hit by easyihts4u.com and it is creating huge increases in their referrals. All the hits go to one page specifically. From the research we have done, this site and others like it, are not spam bots. We cannot understand how they choose sites to target and what good it does for them, or our client to have hits all on one days to one page? We created a filter in analytics to create what we think is a more accurate reflection of traffic. Should be block them at the server level as well?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • MattRoney
        MattRoney last edited by

        Hi Teamzig! Did Chris's response help? We'd love an update. 🙂

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • ChrisAshton
          ChrisAshton last edited by

          I can't say I've come across this one before but I've just done some brief research and basically it appears to be a fake traffic website, as the name would suggest.

          Sites like this work on a scheme where you visit sites in their list of "members" and this earns you credits. The more credits you earn this way, the more people can visit your site. Think of it like exchanging visits.

          I've never used one of these myself but I'd imagine there will be certain criteria that must be met to earn the credits; maybe a certain time on page or performing an action so you're not generating a bounce.

          A bit more info I found on a black hat forum:

          "...easyhists4u is, alike others, website service, which will give you plenty of free and real traffic, however, to get the free traffic, if you don't wanna pay for it, you firstly need to earn credits and to earn credits, you need to browse other people's websites, then you earn credits and you can exchange those credits for a free traffic. It's simple and easy, but the catch is, you're trading your own free time for your traffic, which is kinda a deadend, because you need to spend like 1 hour to get enough credits for like 10 visitors to your page, which is kinda a joke, if you think about that."

          As for the question of how this benefits you, real and engaged traffic has been proven to help your rankings in the short term. It stands to reason that continuing to pay for traffic every day would offer you continued improved rankings as a result of this traffic. I don't condone this sort of thing since it misses the true point of SEO and just focusses on SERP positions.

          Finally, how your client was selected is one that I can only speculate on. I'd suggest it's either a previous SEO provider submitted them to this scheme so they could report "traffic growth" to the client. Alternatively, the owners of this site fake traffic site could randomly select domains to drop into their members list so that people do exactly what you've done here - notice them in the referral list and look closer at them.

          All in all, I'd suggest contacting them and attempting to have the site removed from their list and adding them to the disavow file as well. It's unlikely you'll get a response from them but it's worth the 60 seconds it takes to send an email anyhow.

          Fake traffic like this is painful because it completely messes with your stats and forces you to mess around with filters to exclude them as a referral source.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • 1 / 1
          • First post
            Last post

          Got a burning SEO question?

          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


          Start my free trial


          Browse Questions

          Explore more categories

          • Moz Tools

            Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

          • SEO Tactics

            Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

          • Community

            Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

          • Digital Marketing

            Chat about tactics outside of SEO

          • Research & Trends

            Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

          • Support

            Connect on product support and feature requests.

          • See all categories

          Related Questions

          • AndrisZigurs

            What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?

            I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs
            0
          • RobinJA

            Does ID's in URL is good for SEO? Will SEO Submissions sites allow such urls submissions?

            Example url: http://public.beta.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online It's our sites beta URL, We are going to implement it for our site. After implementation, it will be live on travelyaari.com like this - "https://www.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online". We have added the keywords etc in the URL "VRL Travels". But the problems is, there are multiple VRL travels available, so we made it unique with a unique id in URL - "13555".  So that we can exactly get to know which VRL Travels and it is also a solution for url duplication. Also from users / SEO point of view, the url has readable texts/keywords - "vrl travels online". Can some Moz experts suggest me whether it will affect SEO performance in any manner? SEO Submissions sites will accept this URL? Meanwhile, I had tried submitting this URL to Reddit etc.  It got accepted.

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA
            0
          • 2mlab

            Pages mirrored on unknown websites (not just content, all the HTML)... blackhat I've never seen before.

            Someone more expert than me could help... I am not a pro, just doing research on a website... Google Search Console shows many backlinks in pages under unknown domains... this pages are mirroring the pages of the linked website... clicking on a link on the mirror page leads to a spam page with link spam... The homepage of these unknown domain appear just fine... looks like that the domain is partially hijacked... WTF?! Have you ever seen something likes this? Can it be an outcome of a previous blackhat activity?

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2mlab
            0
          • _nitman

            How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?

            I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case. **Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page. Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well. **What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _nitman
            0
          • Choice

            Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL

            I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice
            0
          • kymodo

            Why website isn't showing on results?

            Hello Moz! Just got a quick question - we have a clientcalled and for some reason they just aren't showing up in the search results. It's not a new domain and hasn't been penalised (or has reason for penalty). All the content is fresh and has no bad back links to the site. It is a new website and has been indexed by Google but for even for branded search terms, it just doesn't show up anywhere on page 1 (i think page 4). Any help or advise is great appreciated is it's doing my head in. We are using www.google.com.au. Kindest Regards

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kymodo
            0
          • razasaeed

            Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop

            Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed
            0
          • highlyrelevant

            Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?

            I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?

            White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant
            0

          Get started with Moz Pro!

          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

          Start my free trial
          Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz API
          • Moz Data
          • STAT
          • Product Updates
          Moz Solutions
          • SMB Solutions
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Digital Marketers
          Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Authority Checker
          • Link Explorer
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • Brand Authority Checker
          • Local Citation Checker
          • MozBar Extension
          • MozCast
          Resources
          • Blog
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Help Hub
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • How-to Guides
          • Moz Academy
          • API Docs
          About Moz
          • About
          • Team
          • Careers
          • Contact
          Why Moz
          • Case Studies
          • Testimonials
          Get Involved
          • Become an Affiliate
          • MozCon
          • Webinars
          • Practical Marketer Series
          • MozPod
          Connect with us

          Contact the Help team

          Join our newsletter
          Moz logo
          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
          • Accessibility
          • Terms of Use
          • Privacy

          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.