Does anyone know if it's a violation of TOS to purchase traffic from a traffic provider and set it to an Adsense site? My personal thought is that it's no different than buying advertisements on an ad network as the end result is that you are essentially buying traffic there too.
Yes arbitrage, you wont find a lot on Google or within their TOS about it, basically people were buying traffic from adwords and filling their MFAs (made for adsense) sites with high paying key words, they'd buy cheap ad's and send traffic to the high paying key word pages in attempts to gain a profit. It's a shady area that isn't addressed, often adsense members are banned for invalid clicks for this reason. It's not as clear as that though - there's alot more involved. Smart pricing and banning MFAs was brought in by Google to combat this tactic.
i'm pretty sure it's not a violiation as i've bought before.. but you have to be careful where you buy as I've bought from companies who send fake hits which can alert google of the high number of impressions your're beginning to receive.
Yes the fake hits from Auto Surf, Manual Surf, Paid to Click, Paid eMails and simlar exchanges is strictly forbidden - this is clearly stated in Google TOS.
I had a feeling this was forbidden Thanks for all the info folks. I'm guessing that most of the time this purchased traffic isn't great quality anyway. I've purchased some before I had adsense running and didn't find that my overall traffic stayed up after the campaign was up. I didn't get many clicks on my Adbrite ads either.
Yup those are the key words, Google wants quality visitors and interested visitors to be clicking the ad's in the end - as this means more conversions for the advertiser and in return it means more returning cutomers to Adwords.
Adsense Arbitrage is not allowed anymore. Quite a lot of users got their accounts banned for doing that.
You can drive traffic to your adsense rich website using ADWORDS or any other PPC programs. Google itself promotes this money cycle.
That is true. Which is why I wasn't sure. I was just thinking of sites like buyhitscheap.com where it would show that it's coming from them. Well I guess Adwords would show that it's coming from Adwords too.... I don't think I'm going to do it as it seems sort of fishy. I mean Google can cancel an account for whatever reason they want so I want to stay on their good side as much as possible.
You could probably drive real traffic, I mean real users, as you said thats what google does, gets traffic to sites.
Those who started with MFAs and bought traffic are now millionaires. And Google has learned its lesson.