Spotting Bad Traffic Exchanges Part 3: What kind of history does it have?
Looking at the front page of an exchange can give you some indicators of how Good or Bad it’ll be. But sometimes it takes looking into the history of the exchange to get the full picture. Has the exchange gone down before? Did they lose their entire database? Will it happen again? Looking into the history of an exchange can give you an indication of the future.
Archive Information
First goto Archive.org and type the website domain into the “Way Back Machine”. Click “Take me Back”. You’ll now see a listing of dates (if it’s been around and important enough to get archived). Each day will have a different archive of the page over time. Click through a couple each year. If you see the website has errors like “Site Suspended” or a default “your website goes here” page after the exchange launched, this tells you they’ve had issues with their hosting. You can check the dates around it to see how long of a period it happened for.
Google Cache
If you goto Google and type site:startxchange.com you’ll see the pages as Google sees them. These don’t go back as far as the Archives do, but it has something I find more important.. Malware notices. If a website has or recently has hidden malware on their site, there is a good chance Google has found it and will display a warning when you view the sites they have in their index. If they don’t have any pages listed, that is also an indicator that the exchange is too new. It really isn’t hard to get at least one page listed.
Why this matters
This matters because it deals with reliability. If an exchange has dissapeared in the past, there is a good chance it’ll disapear in the future too. I’ve experienced a few exchanges where the owner bailed out, and then re-launched only to bail out again. Some problems can be out of the control of the owner, but sometimes you have to ask yourself if it really is out of their control when you see it happen repeatedly.
You are focusing on the past, my exchange is GOOD now!
Ok, so you can’t change your past downtime but you can change your future downtime. Pick a host that’s known to be reliable, don’t go for the cheapest one around. Sign up to Alertra and get notified when your site goes down. Tell Google you fixed the malware problem and use a service like Hacker Safe to help you prevent it from happening again. If you’ve had past problems you need to make it top priority to not have them happen again.
AWESOME series! Excellent tips! The information you have provided should be very helpful to those who are new to surfing traffic exchanges.
Hi Tim,
I am new to the whole TE Idea! If you look up my account, You will see the very first day I ever joined! It was statxchange! I am glade I did! I have a great team Leader.
I dont know much about what I am doing, But I am learning more every day! Keep up the great work and thanks for all the great tips!
Kenny
I belong to quite a few traffic exchanges. Thanks for the pointers on how to determine if they have been reliable in the past and expected to provide value going forward. The malware/spyware info was a good tip also.
Margie Franklin, The Home Biz Diva
Google Me
I will use this valuable information. Traffic Exchanges are important for getting our sites noticed, so it’s nice to know how to watch out for the ones that fail to deliver.
Margie Franklin, The Home Biz Diva
Brand Yourself Google Me
Ouch, that malware thing stings for people that show up like that.
I wasn’t aware of alertra. I’ve written a php script to ping my server and text message me when it’s down. I have it running on my local pc every 10 minutes using windows task scheduler. However, there’s a problem…
I don’t really use my cell phone that much. =/ So if it does go off, I don’t hear it. It looks like that’s what alertra does as well.. dang I should use my cell phone more.
Or find a service to transport messages directly to my brain.
Tim, this is awesome, you just keep putting this info out. I very much appreciate the pointer towards checking for malware. In fact, since Part Two I have already found your guidance useful in deciding on joining up in some TEs that were new to me. Keep on keeping on, my man. This is really valuable service. Thanx muchly.
Great information, especially for newbies online! I love it - from now on I will check EWERY TE before to join. Thank you very much for educating us:-)
[...] news sites is an easy way to find both the good and bad about an exchange. Going back to the history here, you might be able to dig up some bad news about an exchange. If you seem to get only negative [...]