Proxy Builder Blog

I have been in the proxy business for about 10 months now, so I thought I would give a little oversight of what I’ve seen and done in that time. I got very lucky from the start of my proxy business and managed to grab some premium domains before the proxy gold rush struck in. I think its been alot easier to pull in and keep traffic because I own some memorable domains. At times it can be hard work though, I hit a bit of a wall about two months ago where I was just about breaking even on Adsense after server fees and domain renewals.

With alot of effort I managed to turn that around by cutting my server fees and of course if your outgoings are less you basically left with more profit at the end of the day. I didnt actually realise how antiquanted and slow my old servers were so they have given my websites a new lease of life. Simply switching to more powerful servers has doubled my traffic within a week, I look forward to seeing the longterm effects. All my servers are now 4GB Intel Core 2 CPU 6600, a big step up from my underpowered and old P4 2800’s.

Now, the proxy industry in general began its boom between january and may. Many people thought it was a guaranteed quick buck and in many cases it was, but smart-pricing kicks in about a week after and with the low summer traffic thats coming proxy webmasters find it even harder to get visitors. Proxy.org also had some problems of its own, a bot master was attacking adsense on any proxy site listed and many people lost their Adsense accounts. Luckily for me I only took a “fine” of about $150, mainly because I pride myself on building individual and high quality websites. I also saw over 10,000 web proxies get wiped off the proxy.org listings in the last month or so.

Thats basically a roundup of recent proxy events in the last few months, summer traffic will be the main problem for any proxy owners who dont have a solid network going. Luckily for me, my traffic is going up right now!

Topsites have been around for almost as long as the internet itself, they rank websites in a variety of ways but ultimately the most high traffic websites should make their way to the top. I run several myself so I know they can rank well for both popular and longtail keyword searches. All of my topsites receive over 1k uniques a day, mainly from search engines. Of course, not every proxy topsite provides the same level of quality or traffic so which topsites are worth submitting to?

Look out for the following:

• Poorly maintained lists. Topsites are an easy target for link spammers and if you are linking to a spammy site, your website may suffer some consequences in the search engines.
• Biased topsite owners who regularly list their own web proxies and remove rival listings.
• Default topsite buttons or multiple topsites with near identical buttons usually mean very little effort has been put into the website.
• If alot of ranked websites use iframes or other unfair methods then inbound PageRank to the topsite can be lost. Subsequently there is less outbound PageRank to share between the other links and everyone loses.

Now you know how to spot the bad Topsites we can move on. When submitting to topsites by hand, I personally create 2-3 descriptions for each site and different titles for every submission. Alternating the descriptions and titles should give you a better ranking for a variety of keywords in the search engines.

Speed is key. You want your page to load as quickly as possible so all the topsite buttons load and you get an extra visitor counted on the topsite. You will rarely find more than 20 buttons on any of my proxy websites. Besides that, who really wants to look at 100 topsite buttons loading? I sure dont and I instantly delete any websites like that as I manually review them on my own proxy topsites.

For all the people too busy to add their web proxies to a dozen or so topsites, you can now use FreeProxySubmit.com and get instant HTML codes for a whole bunch of proxy topsites. I recommend selecting and adding only the best quality topsites to your web proxy.

Welcome to the new Proxy Builder blog and my first attempt at real blogging. I hope to build up a valuable, reliable and regularly updated resource for proxy users and webmasters to compliment our main website. At Proxy Builder we already offer great guides, topsite listings and a popular online tool which allows people to create customized web proxy sites in seconds.

Proxy Builder is run by Venture Fox Ltd, a UK based web development company specializing in proxy websites. Our network includes many strong websites and domains, including Proxy Directory, Proxy Topsite and Proxy Browsing. I hope to share my experiences, knowledge and research to help other proxy webmasters in this very turbulent business.