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Comment by proksoup | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of what my first impression of LinkExchange was.

Webrings! Everyone wins. No sarcasm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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