As we said before, on this “Website Traffic Series” we are going to cover ALL the traffic generation tactics and strategies out there, even the weird and the blackhat ones!
Now instead of opening up some security holes on your website and waiting for a real hacker to come (which apart from the traffic would also give you some head aches…) you could simply fake the attack.
All you need to do is to create a weird HTML page, put a “This website was hacked” message there, and redirect your domain to that page.
Does it work?: Yes and no. First of all you need to have a somewhat popular website already for this to work minimally well. No one is going to care if your two-week old .blogspot blog should get hacked, right?
If you do have a somewhat popular website, though, there are chances that you will receive a good amount of backlinks and traffic with this technique. JohnCow.com pulled that trick some months ago. For 24 hours he redirected the visitors to his domain to a page that contained the image on top of this post.
Many people linked to him as a result. Some thinking it was for real. Some calling him out for a cheap stunt. Others just intrigued by the whole deal.
As you can see it does work to some extent, but it will also bring some negative publicity and criticism to your website.
How to get started: Personally I would not try to generate traffic with this method. I think it might work for sites that deal with blackhat or out-of-the-box promotional methods (JohnCow.com was born as a parody site after all), but that is not the case with most of us. Try this at your own risk, therefore.
Over to the readers: Have you ever considering to take something on your site to generate traffic? Would you get pissed if a website that you read regularly pulled this trick on your?
Website Traffic Series
- Part 1: Using Web Design and CSS Galleries
- Part 2: Submitting Your Content to Blog Carnivals
- Part 3: Leaving Comments on Other Blogs
- Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
- Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
- Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
- Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
- Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
- Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
- Part 10: Using Email Signatures
- Part 11: Putting Your URL On Online Profiles
- Part 12: Emailing Bloggers to Showcase Your Best Content
- Part 13: Faking a Hacker Attack
- Part 14: Promoting Your Content on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 15: Promoting Posts That Link to You on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 16: Promoting Your Content on Social Networking Sites
- Part 17: Using Article Directories
- Part 18: Exchanging Links with Partner Sites
About Mark Felix
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
Hi Denial
No man, it’s a bad tip in the long run:)
Oh boy, this is nice trick!
Nice tip !!
its a fuc**** way to use these sort of startegies. This shows that you dont know how to bring traffic. You can create a scene and easily get attention. You would be more satisfied if you bring 100 visitors by ur strategy than doing these cheap stunts.
Ah yes, I remember this stunt.
Interesting article Daniel, something I never considered before not that I would every do it however still interesting.
Very interesting idea,… I will not try it, but the final result can be very good! Best regards!
Well, that was a clever trick the first time someone did it, but used too often, that sounds desperate. No?
@suresh, depending on your niche the visitors can stick and or even become loyal readers. There are many people out there who like to follow “pioneers” and blackhat guys.
i think that was the biggest mistakes if you do that. you can lost your many readers
I am one of those people that eres on the side of caution. I wouldn’t do it but it does build some buzz for those that do.
I am a pretty straight guy and all the techniques I use to drive traffic to my site are whitehat. I think this is completely stupid if someone does this and it could get a lot of negative attention.
Truthfully I like to do it the honest way. I would be pissed if someone lies to me and faked one of these because I build ym entrepreneurs blog on honesty, not the ‘fake it to make it’ strategy
In the past I faked an event or two (non-hacker related) on some of my older, now defunct blogs. Honestly, I did it to see what would happen, plus I wanted to wrap up those blogs and the faked events were a good way to do so. Sure, there was a traffic spike revolving around these events but in the long run (which I wasn’t concerned with as they were meant to be short term blogs) it’s not good.
Hi Denial
If this was me I would decide not to do it. I just think that the consequences are worse for you then anything good that could come from it. I mean I’m sure there are many people out there that are going to try to prove that you are really not being hacked. I’m pretty sure one of those people will be able to do so and then you’re stuck explaining why you pretended to be hacked.
As you rightly said this hacking not seems to be a good idea.
That’s why so many websites got hacked today!