A few months back Andy Brice wrote an excellent post about an experiment he did of submitting a fake application to all the download sites. If you have not read it, I recommend that you do. It is real enlightening. This is post is my experience.
Today I published Omni Customer Support 1.0 to several hundred download sites using RoboSoft. In response I received just shy of 100 emails, most of them minutes after my software was uploaded. Most of the emails asked for a link to their site. Some of them would not accept my upload until I did so. Probably half of them gave me an award "after they reviewed it and it passed their rating guidelines." I was ready for this after reading Andy's post.
There was also a number of the sites that wanted me to register my software with RegNow and provided a link with their affiliate number in it to sign up right now. I'm guessing they get some sort of kickback if I were to sign up. The hook is that "Software products that are registered with RegNow that have higher page view count will be ranked higher on our site." So sign up and I will have a better listing on their site.
This same concept of "raking higher on their site" is also used if you link to them. And if I wanted them to process my upload faster, linking to them will speed up the process. I understand why they would want the link from me, SEO and some extra traffic, but it does feel a little like a bit like extortion.
But the kicker was this one: Please download a copy of your award at http://-----site-----/images/star5Award.gif and display it on your website. We encourage you to place a hyperlink on the award logo and link it to your software page at http://----site-----/OmniCustomerSupport_software37707.htm This will increase Internet traffic to your page and it will receive higher placement by search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
I'm curious to know how having the award on my site will increase my traffic. I would really like to know how it would increase my ranking in Google. Perhaps they know something I don't know.
I ran WebSiteGrader on Omni Customer Support and saved off the overall score and the number of both Google and Yahoo inbound links. I'll report back on how it changes after having been on the download sites for a while.
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1 comment:
i too, am trying to start a micro isv, i came across your blog and i understand what you are going through with the fake awards and what not, well just don't give up!
Here is my blog, it has the same template as yours:
http://www.keyprowler.com/blog/blog/blogger.html
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