I put out a brand new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has to date received 16 completely different awards and recommendations from software program obtain sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement similar to "Great job, we're really impressed!". I ought to be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software program, except that the 'software program' would not even run. That is hardly stunning when you think about that it is only a textual content file with the phrases "this program does nothing at all" repeated just a few occasions after which renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software accommodates the outline "This program does nothing in any respect".
Even the identify of the software, "awardmestars", was a bit of a giveaway. And yet it still gained 16 'awards'.
Some of them look quite spectacular, but none of them are worth the electrons it takes to display them.
The apparent rationalization is that some download websites give an award to every piece of software program submitted to them. In return they hope that the writer will display the award with a link again to them. The backlink then probably will increase site visitors to their site instantly (via clicks on the award hyperlink) and not directly (by improved web page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download web site gets further traffic.
This practise is blatantly misleading and dishonest. It makes no distinction between prime quality software program and any old garbage that somebody was ready to undergo an obtain site. The download websites that practise this deceit should be ashamed of themselves. Equally, any creator or company, that displays one in all these 'awards' is both being naive (at greatest) or knowingly colluding within the scam (at worst).
My suspicions were first aroused by the variety of 5 star awards I obtained for my PerfectTablePlan software. After I went to those websites all the other packages on them appeared to have five star awards as well. I also observed that a few of my weaker opponents had been proudly displaying pages full of 5 star awards. I saw very few three or four star awards. One thing smelled fishy. Being a scientist by unique coaching, I decided to run a bit of experiment to see if a very nugatory piece of software program would win any awards.
Having seen numerous suggestions for the rundenko.com submit-everywhere.com submission service on the ASP forums I emailed the owner, Mykola Rudenko, to ask if he may help with my little experiment. To my surprise, he generously agreed to assist by submitting "awardmestars" to all 1033 sites on their database, freed from charge.
Based on the report I acquired 2 weeks after submissions began "awardmestars" is now listed on 218 websites, pending on 394 websites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Roughly 7% of the sites that listed the software program emailed me that it had won an award (I do not know how many have displayed it with an award, without informing me). With 394 pending sites it might win fairly just a few more awards yet. Many of the rejections were on the grounds of "The positioning doesn't accept products of this style" (it was listed as an utility) reasonably than quality grounds.
The truth is that many download websites are simply digital dung heaps, utilizing faux awards, doubtful search engine optimisation and content material misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic try to make a number of dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these backside-feeders will likely be put out of enterprise by the continually bettering search engines like google, leaving only the higher sites. I believe there is nonetheless a job for good quality download sites. However there must be extra emphasis on high quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. evaluations). Whether it is possible for such an enterprise to be worthwhile, I don't know. Nonetheless, it appears to work within the MacOSX world where the download sites are much fewer in number, but with much larger high quality and extra consumer interaction.
Some download website owners did e mail me to say either "very humorous" or "stop wasting my time". Kudos to them for taking the time to verify each submission. I like to recommend you put their sites high on your list subsequent time you might be searching for software program:
filecart.com
freshmeat.net
obtain-tipp.de (German)
This is the response I got from Lothar Jung of download-tipp.de when I showed him a draft of this article:
"The opposite side for me as a website publisher is that if you do not give each software 5 stars, you don't get so many oneway links and some authors aren't more than happy with this and your website. After I started obtain-tipp.de, I wished to create a site the place users can discover good software. So I made a decision the visitor is important, and not the number of backlinks. Only 10% of all packages submitted get the 5 Suns Award."
One other important challenge for obtain websites is trust. I wish to know that the software program I am downloading would not comprise spyware and adware, trojans or other malware. Among the obtain websites have cunningly exploited this by awarding "100% clear" logos. I at the moment use the Softpedia one on the PerfectTablePlan obtain page. It should not be too difficult in principal to scan software for recognized malware. But now I'm beginning to wonder if these 100% clear logos have any more substance than the "five star"awards. The only solution to find out for sure could be to submit a download with malware, which might be unethical. If anybody has any information about whether these websites really examine for malware, I might have an interest to know.
My thanks to submit-everywhere.com for making this experiment possible. I used to be favourably impressed by the thoroughness of their service. At only $70 I believe it's glorious worth compared to the time and hassle of making an attempt to do it yourself. I expect to be a paying customer in future.
** Addendum **
This little experiment has been featured on reddit.com, digg.com, slashdot.com, stumbleupon.com and a lot of other fashionable sites and blogs. Consequently there have been a whole lot of feedback on this blog and on different sites. I'm very flattered by the interest. However I additionally really feel like Dr Frankenstein, looking on as my experiment good points a life of its own. If I had identified the article was going to be learn by so many people I would have taken a bit extra time to make clear the next factors
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