Archive for August 17th, 2007

The software awards scam

Friday, August 17th, 2007

This site did a little investigation into those software awards that are given out by download sites.

The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.