Monday, July 21, 2008

Awards Scams

Back in the mid 1990's, I ran a Web site that had some decent traffic. I used to get a lot of emails from people who wanted to give it awards. A lot of times, however, these people just wanted me to post a link to their Web site so they could steal some of my traffic.

The same thing still seems to be happening, not only with Web sites, but also with software. For example, this programmer created a program that did not run, and used a service to submit it to a bunch of software download sites. Can you believe 23 of them gave it a five star rating? Remember, this is a program that did not run or do anything!

Link to article

I suppose the part that scares me the most is how sites display banners that say "Hacker Proof", or programs display ads on their Web site that say 100% spyware free. Most home users do not know the difference between a McAfee certification and some no-name site that isn't worth anything.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The reason they want a link from a high traffic site, is that one of the ways Google uses to rank a site is by the weight (a high traffic site) and number of sites that link to you.

So if you have a high traffic site, and you give a site a link, it actually works in the linked site favor with rankings with Google.

Now the trick is to use this information to your clients advantage as a web designer...