[proksoup]

Reminds me of what my first impression of LinkExchange was.

Webrings! Everyone wins. No sarcasm.

[jakejake]

Ah web-rings! I remember they were quite fun and interesting at first. I'd actually click from one site to the next in a ring to check them all out. Of course that was a time when there were limited numbers of sites for niche topics, and discovering them was a more "word-of-mouth" thing. I was also surfing on a 56k modem.

Not to poo-poo on what seems to be an honest effort with TrafficGun, though. I don't know if the sharing spirit of website owners is the same as it was back then, but it would be nice.

[kristopolous]

It's how it works. All the star, follow, reblog platforms basically expose your presence on that persons "blog" in a push manner.

Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, instagram ... They all have a number of indirect ways of this.

And as someone who has had to do icky marketing on these platforms, doing that process is the best way to grow.

[yabbadabbadoo]

TrafficGun isn't about SEO/links. Its about gaining real, live visitors.

To this end, we strongly encourage all users on our platform to nofollow all links.

[proksoup]

Wait --- how do the real live visitors get to your site if not a link?

I don't follow how nofollow makes it not a link web ring?

No sarcasm, I used webrings in 1996 to great effect. Not for SEO. For real live visitors.

[yabbadabbadoo]

Ahh, my bad. I thought you were implying this was some sort of link exchange scheme for SEO.

But yes, cross-promotions work great for growing traffic long-term. See this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459902