Software Awards To Get Backlinks

[peter_d]

A dodgy twist to the ye-olde web awards technique:

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.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-17-n77.html

[nhebb]

I wrote about this the other day:
[last blog entry, on left]

I think link spammers will pick up on this but I don't think they'll get much for their efforts. One of the problems is that download sites base their listings off of PAD files (Portable Application Description). So every link is going to be surrounded by content duplicated all over the place. There is such a thing as dynamic PAD to circumvent this problem, but re-writing your PAD description umpteen million ways takes a lot of time and effort.

FWIW, Blue Hat SEO actually wrote about a similar money-making/link build scheme like this earlier this year.

I've submitted by software to ~1000 sites. You end up getting a few hundred direct backlinks out of it but very little link juice. I didn't raise in the rankings until I did other SEO tactics.

Personally, as a software developer, I kind of wish the download sites did get bombarded with spam listings. Maybe it would force them to clean up their listings. But really, if anyone is considering this as a quick and easy method to gain a few hundred back links, you're efforts are better spent elsewhere.