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Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam
vlastimil:
I finally found time to blog about it... http://www.rw-designer.com/entry/293
mahesh2k:
Mouser, do you see any traffic from CNET in your server analytics logs ? If yes then it is good for developers in general and if not then they're basically creating traffic leak for freeware or shareware products or respective author site.
y0himba:
It appears OpenDNS is now classifying the site in the Adware category...
Cnet's Download.com and the installer scam
mouser:
vlastimil -- Awesome page :up:
y0himba -- That's very interesting. The one thing that would make Cnet reverse course faster than anything would be if this move started causing them to drop in rank on search results. Here's a case where a policy of ethical search engine strategy could be used for good and not evil.. The problem is that the search engine companies are such behemoths that it's impossible to contact anyone at the companies who has the power to do something..
mahesh2k -- Actually I've only recently noticed that CNet software listing pages seem to not show links to the authors web pages, which is a separate battle we need to fight with them, since that's pretty outrageous on it's own. Because of that, I'm not sure that CNet creates much traffic to DC from their normal software listing pages. However, CNet seems to be sufficiently popular download site and users and editors review and rate our software on those pages. And DC software tends to be quite highly regarded on those pages. And the review ratings are shown as graphical stars and are ranked very high in (google) search engine results. I think the ner effect of all this is that CNet pages are likely to have a positive effect in terms of people discovering our software. That's more intuition than anything. On the other hand, your point and vlastimil's very interesting early post where he suggested that the CNet pages could actually be competing for traffic *against* us are intriguing.
y0himba:
In my opinion, if a software site offers a program for download, a link to the developer/author should be displayed prominently as one of the first links you see.
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