Fake a hack attack to get more traffic

[Kay]

I came across this piece of 'advice'.

100. Fake a hacker attack. The community of bloggers and webmasters gets in turmoil every time a website or blog gets hacked. If you fake such an attack (i.e., by putting a weird message in your homepage) you’ll certainly receive many backlinks and a bump in traffic. People might get p!ssed if they find out it was a prank, though.

Source: here

LOL! Maybe it would work for some people, but you'd have to be pretty desperate to use that as a traffic building tactic. And why? What use would the extra traffic be? Maybe you'd scare away the useful visitors. You'd make yourself look vulnerable and people would be scared to trust doing business with you or even leaving details, such as their email address, with you. As for people's reaction to it, I can hardly imagine how my friends would react if they thought my site had been hacked, jumped in and spent their time to help me, and then found out it was only a "prank". Somehow I don't think it would go down very well at all.

This isn't anything that I would want to try. What do you think of the advice?

Edit - of course, giving crazy advice is another way to build traffic, but I don't expect it would do very much to improve your reputation.

[grynge]

I would say 1 big warning about that would be if you do sales, people do not like to no the sites they purchase from got hacked, it can be a very big turnoff.

[JohnP]

I think in the end this would indeed be a bad tactic... the backlinks etc. could use "hacked site" for the link text, any write ups about it would flag your site as having been hacked when people read those... it might get traffic, but it likely wouldn't bring too many loyal visitors/customers...

[JJMcClure]

What would be the point, none of that traffic is going to generate revenue, they only came to see a hacked site. Genuine visitors might add the site to their virus/firewall blocked sites list and any backlinks you get from it are most likely going to be out of context and useless to you. You might even get links from a 'bad neighbourhood' which could hurt you these days, apparently.

[cash ninja]

Yes, it seems a little (a lot) counter-intuitive, especially if you are trying to get targeted traffic.

I thought this was quite an interesting article on getting traffic, well actually it's about getting PR and publicity but obviously in web terms, that means traffic: [Edit by Kay - this site is NSFW.] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog.../ryan-holiday/

In a nutshell, the guy is saying be controversial, although obviously there's more to it than that.