began to charge for traffic and around this time the concept changed from a tool for locating interesting sites to a commercial one. This change in direction resulted in increased popularity at the expense of the content which is now almost exclusively commerce. Traffic Exchange vs. Bounce Rate Most people use Traffic Exchange programs to increase their site visit rate. Traffic Exchange programs offer both the Auto and Manual Surf options with a timing of 3 to 60 seconds. An 'autosurf' program requires no human intervention to rotate the sites in the database, and is used primarily to inflate the total number of site hits. This practice is rather controversial as it may skew the results of website popularity. People's main reason behind joining a Traffic Exchange program is to promote products and services to like-minded marketers. A factor that may negatively influence the ranking is the Bounce Rate. If a website or blog has a high bounce rate then it will be considered that people are not interested in the content. The bounce rate is calculated by the average rate a visitor stayed on the site. So whereas the traffic exchange sites increase the site visit rate, on the other hand they also increase the bounce rate. A higher bounce rate generally harms SEO performance, so using a traffic exchange comes with risks as well. AdSense on Traffic Exchanges Google disallows using AdSense on Traffic Exchanges. Users who wish to advertise their websites on a traffic exchange but also have AdSense ads should create separate pages for advertising in traffic exchanges that do not have AdSense ads. Sending traffic sourced from a traffic exchange to a website monetized using AdSense or other ad networks like Adfly is likely to get the user banned from the network. References Traffic exchanges