Traffic Tagger [review]

I appreciate your thoroughness…and cutting through the hype.

Great Brett / thanks. You so much bring us to the truth behind it all. Your reward for your truthfulness (even with friends who request your revews) will be loyalty from your clients (me being one) and revenue through your affiliate links. Please do not be tempted to compromise your own ‘standards’…..like so many others have. I have already purchased through you because of your ‘give back’ to your clients by the way you keep us well informed. Cheers. Leon

You never know, there might have been a difference if you’d had the instructions sent to you!

Hey Brett,

Thanks again for an honest review.. I’m starting to like you every time and more. 🙂

Hi Brett,

I’m Matt’s business partner and the creator (& developer) of Traffic Tagger. Firstly thanks for the review of Traffic Tagger, clearly I’d have loved your experience to be better but it wasn’t and your review reflected that.

I’m actually extremely proud of Traffic Tagger, I’ve long been a ‘believer’ in the power of WordPres tags and Traffic Tagger is the 3rd in the line of tagging plugins I’ve produced (previously TagPiG & Tag.FM). It’s a brand new product but it leverages all of the knowledge I’ve gained about the power of WordPress tagging over the years.

All that being said obviously you did not have a good experience with Traffic Tagger so if it’s okay with you I’d like to address a few of the concerns & points your raised.

Why Did I Build Traffic Tagger?
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WordPress’ native post tagging system has always had the potential to be a very powerful method of creating additional keyword focused pages on your sites. Unfortunately is very poorly implemented in the default WordPress setup and results in poorly focused pages often containing a lot of duplicate content.

Because of these problems SEOers have long been handing out the advice that you should noindex your tag archive pages, in fact many of the most popular SEO plugins do this automatically for you. Given the poor quality of the native WordPress tag archive pages then I cannot argue with this tactic, but it always struck me as odd telling the world’s biggest search engine to ignore 100’s or even 1000’s of pages of content on your blog…

I saw the no-index approach as more of a sticking-plaster over a problem that actually needed a fix. As a developer I’m always interested in fixing rather than just papering over them, so I set out to create Traffic Tagger to fix the issues.

What Does Traffic Tagger Actually Do?
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In a nutshell here is what Traffic Tagger does:

1. It automatically analyses your post content and extracts keywords to use as post tags. This is primarily done behind the scenes so whether you’re posting remotely or scheduling or autoblogging it handles every scenario. You can tweak the relevance of the keywords that Traffic Tagger auto-discovers for you post, higher relevance = less keywords. As you discovered Traffic Tagger also works in manual mode so you can choose whether to add tags as you craft your post but this is really a bolt-on feature and no really the intended use. Traffic Tagger is a built primarily as a fire & forget solution.

2. It throttles amount and order of the tags that are displayed with your posts. Traffic Tagger creates a LOT of tags automatically (depending on settings) BUT it does not and should not leverage ALL of these tags at once. Traffic Tagger will intelligently display a subset of your tags beneath each post and it can also be set to rotate them over time so that every tags gets equal exposure. Alternatively you can have Traffic Tagger promote your most used tags first.

3. It rechecks your old posts for new tags. Everytime you create a new post Traffic Tagger creates a new batch of relevant tags. But what if some of those tags also appeared in older posts too but weren’t picked up at the time? Well Traffic Tagger will look back in time and retag any of your old posts that contain the new keyword to.

4. It creates focused and unque tag archive pages. This is the where the real power of Traffic Tagger lies. Remember earlier where I said that by default WordPress creates pretty dumb looking tag archive pages? Traffic Tagger completely replaces your native tag archive pages with something I christened Tag Power Pages. The key difference between a Tag Power Page and native tag archive page is that every Tag Power Page is unique whereas most native tag archives pages will be duplicates. Tag Power Pages also contain the snippets of your posts where the focused keyword occurs, including the surrounding text to give contenxt. Native tag archive pages simply regurgitate your entire post content over and over again, or at best they display your post exceprts which probably don’t even contain the focus keyword!

5. It ONLY creates tag archive pages if it knows they will benefit you. Again another dumb feature of the native wordpress tag system is to create a new archive page for EVERY single tag you add. This means you get hundreds of pages that only reference a single post. There is no power in this approach. Instead Traffic Tagger will not create Tag Power Pages until a minimum number of posts share the same tag to ensure they contain enough clout for the search engines.

I have no reservations in saying that I think Traffic Tagger is an extremely powerful plugin. What you experienced does not even scratch the surface of it’s capabilities but I totally understand why you where left with this poor impression given the information you had available. My sincere apologies for that.

I can but hope that people buying the plugin on the 5th will hopefully come into the whole experience with the benfit of all the information from the pre-sales and tutorial videos that we couldn’t provide you and will immediately have a different impression of the power of Traffic Tagger.

I wanted to address a few of your comments directly too:

“Well I never got the tutorial videos”
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As we don’t launch until Aug 5th then the tutorial videos where not ready when you reviewed Traffic Tagger. I don’t like shooting the tutorial videos to early in the beta phase as the UI is still subject to change and if it changes I have to re-shoot the videos. That being said I clearly pushed it too far this time and should have had them up in time for your review. They are up now and I’m adding more as we head towards launch based on beta feedback. I certainly won’t be releasing beta/review software in future without ALL the tutorials in place, thank you for the wake-up call on that front.

“in my tests it did not work a lot of the time”
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I can’t answer this fully without more information such as what version you had, and what content the posts contained. I speculate that either you had actually found a beta bug or we would need to tweak the relevancy settings to ensure enough keywords where being extracted from your content.

Also as we don’t launch until Aug 5th then the copy of the software you received was a beta version. You didn’t mention which version in your review but I’ve certainly posted several updates in the past couple of weeks and some last minute tweaks and compatability issues have been addressed as the plugin makes its way out into the wild via beta testers and partners.

“The settings where easy”
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Thanks. I’m grabbing compliments where I can in this review! 🙂 Indeed Traffic Tagger is incredibly easy to setup, I’ve created many plugins over the years and I’ve become jaded with the ‘feature bloat’ that is invading this space. I have even been guilty of it myself on previous occasions. IMHO plugins should be ultra-focused on one or two key task and they should do these extremely well. There is no need to expose every granular setting to the end user unless adjusting that setting is going to provide real value to the user. This is the philosphy I have tried to follow with Traffic Tagger.

Above all else though I beleive that IM plugins should work out-of-the-box, or as close to it as possible. Traffic Tagger requires one setting to be added out-of-the-box before it starts working and we’ve preset all the other adjustable settings with our ‘best defaults’ so can start seeing results as soon as possible. This is something I plan to do with all my products in the future.

“They did not get added to the custom post”
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Good spot. It definitely only works with the default WordPress post type, not custom post types at this stage. If there is demand I could certainly look to add it as a feature in future but the vast majority of users will be using posts & tags rather than custom post types and custom taxonomies.

“It added these tags to the post (which then become meta tags in the pages HTML)”
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Yes & no. It does add tags to post automatically or semi-automatically but these have nothing to do with your meta tags (unless your theme is setup that way). Meta tags are a different matter entirely and are not the focus of this plugin at all. Meta (keyword) tags make zero difference to your SEO efforts.

“…some really generic keywords that really should not have been entered…These are far to general and are worthless.”
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Traffic Tagger works very differently to the native WordPress tag functionality. You can easily get more keywords delivered by lowering the default relevance score. Traffic Tagger casts its net far and wide to pull in new potential keyword (they must always appear in your posts to qualify) but it does not create Tag Power Pages for these keyword until other posts (past or future) also include these tags. So yes I agree with you that the single post in question is not going to rank for the keyword ‘product vendors’ but when you have 5 posts that all use the tag ‘product vendors’ and Traffic Tagger creates you a Tag Power Page called ‘product vendors’ that contains 5 snippets from each of your posts all centered around the keyword ‘product vendors’ and showing the context of each of those keyword then that page has a good chance of being looked up a valuable by Google etc. If you then multiple this a LOT of times through Traffic Tagger’s automation then you get to see some real results.

It’s the Traffic Power Pages that are the real key to Traffic Taggers success. These are the pages that will rank, these are the pages that trickle pagerank back to the posts that contain the keywords they feature.

“do we really need a plugin to automatically enter the keyword tags?”
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You do if you’re going to do it on any scale. It’s a simple enough task to choose 10 new tags for each article you publish but are you going to go back through your entire post archive and try and match up your new tags with your old posts too? That’s what Traffic Tagger does every day.

Also why only add 10 tags? Why not add 50? Adding 50 is a laborious task manually but Traffic Tagger does it in seconds.

What if you’re not even on your blog posting manually? What if you’re posting remotely?

Hopefully I’ll also convinced that adding tags automatically is just tiny part of what Traffic Tagger brings.

“…is this going to really do anything for your site anyway? Well honestly probably not”
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You quite rightly dismiss the value of meta (keyword) tags. I completely agree with you about this but Traffic Tagger has nothing to do with meta-keywords. Hopefully I’ve explained anough above about what it’s intended affect is but just to reiterate:

Traffic Tagger creates smart Traffic Power Pages which rank for many different keywords and link back to feature posts sending pagerank to where it matters. Ideally your posts link back to your money pages of affiliate links and obviously that’s where the money is.

Final Thoughts
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Wow, reading back through this I see that it is a lot of information I’ve just dumped into your comments section. Hopefully you’ll still publish this as I think it is valuable and perhaps gives some indication as to how passionate I am about all my products but especially Traffic Tagger.

I genuinely believe that Traffic Tagger fixes ALL of the problems that the native WordPress tagging system creates and allows site owners to finally get their valuable tag archive pages re-indexed by Google, safe in the knowledge that they are unique keyword focused pages that Google will see real value in.

I’m not bitter at all about your negative review. You wrote an accurate & honest account of your experience with our software. We let you down by not giving you the information required to properly leverage the software or the correct channels to ask questions if you had any problems (me). Again I apologise for that.

I realise asking for a re-review is probably out of the question as you have a calendar and there are a LOT of products to look at. If as a courtesy you could perhaps add a note to the review saying what version of the software you tested and that it was during the beta stage I’d be most grateful.

All the best and keep up the reviews, god knows this industry needs them.

Gary

Thank you so much for taking the time to write an intelligent, descriptive and non combative response to my review. You would be surprised how some so called ‘professionals’ respond when I give them a bad review. (Most of these responses are so bad that I cant even publish them because if I did it would be nothing but blanked out swear words)

First I want to correct a mistake in the post, which you caught, I should have said that the tags show in as meta tags in MY theme (or even in SOME themes) I should not have made it sound like they always show as meta. Thanks for catching that.

I think your response might have more text in it then the actual review. However Im still not entirely convinced that this warrants a paid plugin or that it brings enough value that people should buy it. I still not convinced at all that this thing will “litterly grow their search engine listings before their eyes” as claimed.

I sent you an email asking you for your Skype. I think its only fair that we have a chat and if you can convince me that I am wrong about the value of this then I will change the review (as well as send out an announcement to my readers). I dont think this will happen but Im willing to listen to your arguments on the benefit of this plugin and why it warrants being a premium one if you would like to give them to me.

I just added this to a number of blogs. I am getting tons of worthless tag word that are very genetic and nothing to do with my posts. But, I am all of a sudden getting these mystery power posts with links to Article powered by saffron extract benefits and others. The articles are all very similar so they will show up as duplicate content. Now, I am trying to go into each blog and delete them. I didn’t buy this plug in so they can spam my posts with their links and duplicate content.

Hope they honor their money back

I added traffic tagger to my training website and it totally stopped all the videos from working. I have hundreds of videos and the plugin added a code to the page or past address that will not allow anyone to open a video with an image link.

I uninstalled the plugin. I am still working through the videos 4 weeks after I uninstalled traffic tagger. Not my favorite plugin at the moment for sure

Bought the plugin and it did what it said it would do,..(it tagged all my posts) , It Tagged the Sh%t out of them. It seemed that it was grabbing words at random that really had nothing to do with the post other than that they where just there………………………………..

Also my CPU Usage from my host when through the roof……….In all fairness im not sure if its related to the plugin but i installed this plugin on a ton of sites , a day or 2 later i was reaching my resource limit………….We are still trying to figure this out with the Host…(so like i said in all fairness)

But in my opinion i really don’t know what to make of it,..Im sitting on the sidelines and watching for now………..(.)

This plugin has been abandoned wish I had read Brett’s review first! THIS MARKETEER IS ONE i WILL NOT BY FROM AGAIN