I put out a new product a few weeks ago. This new product has so far gained sixteen different awards and proposals from software download sites. A few of them even emailed me messages of encouragement reminiscent of "Nice job, we're actually impressed!". I needs to be delighted at this recognition of the standard of my software, besides that the 'software' doesn't even run. This is hardly shocking when you think about that it's just a text file with the words "this program does nothing in any respect" repeated a number of times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software program contains the outline "This program does nothing at all". Even the name of the software program, "awardmestars", was a little bit of a giveaway. And but it nonetheless won sixteen 'awards'. A few of them look fairly impressive, however none of them are well worth the electrons it takes to show them. The plain explanation is that some obtain sites give an award to each piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will show the award with a hyperlink back to them. The inbound link then doubtlessly increases visitors to their web site directly (by means of clicks on the award hyperlink) and indirectly (by way of improved page rank from the incoming hyperlinks). The writer will get some awards to impress their potential purchasers and the obtain site will get additional traffic. This practise is blatantly deceptive and dishonest. It makes no distinction between high quality software and any previous rubbish that somebody was prepared to submit to an obtain site. The obtain sites that practise this deceit must be ashamed of themselves. Similarly, any writer or firm, that shows considered one of these 'awards' is either being naive (at best) or knowingly colluding in the rip-off (at worst). My suspicions had been first aroused by the variety of five star awards I received for my PerfectTablePlan software. When I went to these sites all the opposite applications on them seemed to have 5 star awards as well. I additionally seen that some of my weaker competitors were proudly displaying pages full of five star awards. I noticed only a few three or 4 star awards. Something smelled fishy. Being a scientist by original training, I made a decision to run a little experiment to see if a completely worthless piece of software would win any awards. Having seen various recommendations for the rundenko.com submit-everywhere.com submission service on the ASP boards I emailed the proprietor, Mykola Rudenko, to ask if he might assist with my little experiment. To my shock, he generously agreed to help by submitting "awardmestars" to all 1033 websites on their database, free of charge. In response to the report I received 2 weeks after submissions started "awardmestars" is now listed on 218 sites, pending on 394 sites and has been rejected by 421 sites. Approximately 7% of the websites that listed the software emailed me that it had received an award (I don't know what number of have displayed it with an award, with out informing me). With 394 pending websites it would win quite a couple of extra awards yet. Most of the rejections had been on the grounds of "The site does not settle for merchandise of this genre" (it was listed as an utility) slightly than high quality grounds. The truth is that many obtain sites are just electronic dung heaps, using pretend awards, dubious search engine optimization and content misappropriated from PAD recordsdata in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords. Hopefully these bottom-feeders might be put out of enterprise by the continually enhancing search engines like google, leaving only the higher sites. I feel there is nonetheless a job for good high quality download sites. However there must be extra emphasis on high quality, classification, and additional content (e.g. critiques). Whether it is possible for such a business to be worthwhile, I don't know. Nonetheless, it appears to work within the MacOSX world where the obtain sites are much fewer in number, but with much larger high quality and extra user interaction. Some download website homeowners did e mail me to say either "very funny" 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: filecart.com freshmeat.web obtain-tipp.de (German) That is the response I got from Lothar Jung of download-tipp.de after I showed him a draft of this text: "The opposite side for me as a website writer is that if you do not give each software program 5 stars, you don't get so many oneway links and some authors are not more than happy with this and your website. Once 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 variety of backlinks. Only 10% of all programs 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 does not include spyware and adware, trojans or other malware. Among the download 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 am beginning to wonder if these 100% clear logos have any more substance than the "5 star"awards. The only approach 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 was favourably impressed by the thoroughness of their service. At only $70 I believe it is 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 quite a lot of other in style sites and blogs. Consequently there have been a whole lot of feedback on this blog and on other sites. I'm very flattered by the interest. However I additionally really feel like Dr Frankenstein, looking on as my experiment good points a lifetime 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 following factors
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The writer managed to win sixteen 'awards' from obtain websites for a program that does not even run, proving that the awards handed out by many software obtain websites are utterly bogus.
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