[willilance]

Hi Allan,

I don't have a definite answer to this question, but I do have an assumption...

And I assume that Yes, paid traffic can increase your rankings. For the exact reason you mentioned. I've noticed some sites come up in the rankings much faster when driving paid traffic to them. If a search engine sees a site is popular, they are going to rank it higher, it's as simple as that.

However, to mention the pitfalls, I do think that if you stop paying for your traffic and your traffic goes down significantly, you can fall back down in the rankings and even possibly incur a penalty.

Again, I don't know of any evidence to support this, it is just my assumption, but one from my own experience.