Proxy Builder Blog

I see a lot of proxy websites every day and it amazes me how little effort is put into building some of them. As with any website, if you don’t put time into building it properly then it usually shows in the end result of low visitor numbers and revenue. I always try to give each of my proxy websites a somewhat unique and original feel. This isn’t just to please my visitors but also to make sure I’m compliant with advertiser terms & conditions that frown upon cookie-cutter websites. So here I’ll briefly recap some top tips to help your proxy website do better.

1. Speed up your load times

There are hundreds of proxy websites around and they are all competiting for the same users. One of the first things that a visitor will notice is how fast your proxy homepage loads. If your homepage loads slowly or not at all, you may never get that visitor back as they move on to the next proxy. You should seek to remove any unnecessary HTML or text that adds to the loading time.

2. Write some unique content

This isn’t just for aesthetics, I’ve found it’s very important to the overall success of your website. I’ve heard many horror stories of people getting removed from Adsense and then when I visit their site I see a clone template that they’ve used across 200 other proxy sites. I have very little sympathy as it drag’s down the overall quality of the Adsense program and has a negative effect for all proxy webmasters that use it. Anyone can buy a hundred domains and stick up an identical site on all of them - you don’t create any true value and leech off advertising programs.

3. Don’t overload it with adverts

Proxy websites are a dime a dozen,  so don’t push away your visitors by overloading it with adverts. I’ve always found having two ad boxes and one ad links on my homepage is the most effective earning combination. I may add the occasional 468×60 or 120×600 banner in if it works within the template. You can also earn less in the long term if you place your adverts poorly. Remember that the first one or two blocks of ads will always be the  highest paying so make sure they are placed in the best position - centered and above the fold.

4. Make sure it’s functional

One of the simplest and commonly often overlooked mistakes can be setting up a broken website.  I’ve updated websites in my network before and managed to delete a form tag which stopped visitors from browsing through the proxy. This will quickly kill a proxy website and it may be hard to get those visitors back.

5. Include unique features like a Bookmark & Social Network Link

This is more of a bonus addition that could make your proxy site stand out from the crowd. It show’s your visitors that you have put that little bit of extra effort in and may even help to grow your site. It may also be worth adding  a social bookmarking feature to introduce a viral marketing effect with your site.

6. Use a custom or unique template

If you are looking to grow your network you need to step away from the standard Glype or PHProxy template.  This isn’t totally necessary in every case and the it’s fine to use the standard template for a few websites. It helps to add a bit of variety though and there are so many free templates out there to try.

7. Make sure the URL box is easy to find.

Your visitors are usually very focused and have one thing in mind when they visit your proxy website. You should make sure the URL box is easily found and accessible to visitors. I’ve seen several webmasters in my time that like to hide the URL box, sneak in an Adsense search or add an extra page that visitors have to find. There are many variations to these tricks but none of them work in the long term and only serve to alienate your visitors.

 I set up some proxy websites recently and decided to try a new method to build up traffic. Proxy lists are becoming increasingly popular and starting to receive a lot of rankings in the search engines. I discovered them in part when I bought Automatic Proxy Submitter which automatically submits your proxy website to the lists.  They’ve sent me a few hundred visitors so far this month and I compiled a list of the top ones inside.

Continue Reading Article »

 One of the most important thing’s in running a successful proxy website is having a fast, reliable and safe hosting service. There are a lot of web hosting companies these days and they are all fighting for your business. It’s worth doing your homework though because hosting is notorious for fly-by-night operations that will terminate your account and leave you with nothing.

You should take note that most mainstream hosting providers, like GoDaddy, will not allow any form of proxy on their service. These hosting services were primarily designed to support static content or very low intensity scripts. This is explicitly stated in the often over-looked terms of service agreement you agree to when you join. They quite rightly look after their wider client base and that means stopping the proxy scripts that can drain CPU resources from other sites.

Fortunately for us a few companies have taken on the challenge of providing hosting specifically made for proxy websites. Read on for an overview and please leave a comment if you have any personal recommendations.
Continue Reading Article »

I have been in the proxy business for a long time now and to this day I still get asked how to go about setting up a successful proxy website. There are many steps involved in the process, most of which have become second-nature to me now so I’m going to break it down into a multiple article series. With my first post on the topic I will be discussing how to pick the domain name thats right for you.

I think there are two categories of domains that proxy websites can fall into, you can pick either a domain with proxy related words or.. not. It’s impossible to say which is better because, as with any website,  it will become what you make of it.

Proxy Keyword Domains

The bulk of my network is made up of this type of web proxy, purely because they are easy to remember and will receive free organic search engine traffic in time. I try to think of something catchy that will stick in users minds and may even become synonymous with a proxy website. Examples of this are vtunnel.com and hidemyass.com - they don’t contain the word proxy but are two of the most high traffic proxy sites around.

Alternatively I might see a phrase in a traffic analysis program like Google Analytics or Awstats that is bringing in some traffic to another of my web proxies. If you know that people are searching for a certain phrase then it’ll basically mean free traffic. Obscure phrases can bring in traffic and it’s usually a lot easier to reach #1 in the search engines. Even if its just a few searches a day it can draw in traffic and will  increase as your proxy site gets more popular.

An example of this was when I recently set up IP Cloaking - after a few days I saw I was getting traffic for the keywords “IP Cloaked”. I checked to see if it the domain was available and to my surprise it was. IPCloaked.info was registered and this may have been the source of the searches, but I managed to snag the dot com version which is always the most valuable in my eyes.

You must remember that people will type in a whole bunch of phrases in their search for a proxy website. There are many related words that will bring you targeted traffic like unblock, bypass and anonymous. It may even be a necessity for some people that the domain doesn’t contain “proxy” because that is almost guaranteed to be blocked by web filtering software. Be creative, why not make up a whole new word for it.

Domains without Keywords

I have recently started building proxy sites like this, mainly to make use of some of the domains I have that are currently unused. The main advantage for this type of web proxy is they should stay off the radar of web filtering companies a little bit longer than usual. It will also escape a casual glance from a network administrator that has to manually add banned sites to a block list.

As part of my trial with these arguably less detectable proxy sites I decided to avoid any banned words in the content to lengthen the time they would remain unblocked. I took it one step further with a couple and removed any text at all so the crawling bots from web censorship companies would have even less information to work with. The downside is how to drive traffic to the website, staying in the minds of visitors and getting them to come back to use it again. I’m still working on this so i’ll keep you updated!

 I stumbled across a post on my favourite proxy forum today asking how do filtering companies know which sites to block? As a proxy webmaster it is greatly beneficial to us in traffic and revenue to keep our web proxies unblocked for as long as possible.

When I think about it there are so many different angles that filtering companies can use in order to determine whether your website is a proxy. There are several large companies that offer huge scale filtering and monitoring services like Cyber Patrol, Websense and Bluecoat. A large part of their business model will be devoted to seeking out and blacklisting sites that are will be banned to certain viewers.

I am pretty sure they will be analysing some of the  features below to automatically to work out if it is a proxy. If you want to stay unblocked then remember these things will be checked when the filtering companies’ web spiders come crawling through your site.

Domain Name

As you would expect this will be one of the first things that filtering companies and their categorizing systems review. You can expect that these companies will be pretty advanced in the way they analyse the words in the domain. Any words like proxy, bypass, unblock and anonymous will raise a red flag and call them to do a manual human check. The easiest way to avoid this is to use a domain with no relevance to proxies or other potentially banned words.

Filenames and Images

Many of the companies that provide software for blocking the internet rely on a vast series of spiders and automated bots that crawl the web looking for bad sites. Your site will probably have to under go a human visual verification check  if the files in your template are named like proxy-head1.jpg or proxy.css.

Content and Header information

If you write information about proxies and how they work your site is likely to get you blocked for good. Every bit of the HTML in your pages will be searched by bots in order to categorize and define your website. It is best to avoid all mention of proxy related words from your content if you want to avoid the block.

Links & Affiliates

In the process of sifting through your proxy website HTML, the software will be analysing which sites you are linking to. If a large amount of the outbound links are already blacklisted or the domain’s contain certain words then your site may also get blocked.

IP Address

The I.P Address your proxy website is hosted on can be very important, for example if your site is on a server dedicated to proxy websites, in the long-term your IP address will be banned. This obviously isnt an ideal measure for filtering algorithms to decide on because many servers host multiple sites on the same IP. It will however be analyzed along with the above factors.

To summarize, I run a very successful network of proxy related websites and I expect that most are blocked by filtering software now. I never use these methods so I can’t offer a statistical comparison - this is purely common sense thinking. My success was based on targeting high traffic keywords in the search engines. There is certainly a large audience out there looking for reliable web proxies that may last a week or two longer . The best way to do that is to stay out of filtering software databases.