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Friday, August 17, 2007

Software Awards To Get Backlinks

On Monday Lance Loveday reported on web counters that aim to increase the PageRank of the webcounting site by inserting hidden links. Another scam to get backlinks to increase Googlejuice – and overall traffic – is to put out fake awards. Andy Brice from the UK describes how he put up a “software” that’s actually just a nonsense text file renamed to EXE... and won 16 awards for it. Andy writes:

This practise is blatantly misleading and dishonest. It makes no distinction between high quality software and any old rubbish that someone was prepared to submit to a download site. The download sites that practise this deceit should be ashamed of themselves. Similarly, any author or company, that displays one of these ‘awards’ is either being naive (at best) or knowingly colluding in the scam (at worst).

And adds that he hopes these “bottom-feeder” sites will be put out of business by improved search engines, leaving only the better sites. “The truth is,” he says, “that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords.”

[Via Digg and others.]

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