WTH - software awards?

[fenixproductions]

Hi all.

Few times ago I have found some free time and spent it on fixing BBCeditor bug reported by user via email.

Since then I've received many (~40) messages from various software download sites about some kind of awards (always the best something).

And now I wonder: what the heck is going on?

What the heck is going on with all these relatively new pages saying I have the most downloadable content (right with all zeros) or "super poll" winner application? Is this is a new kind of "let's share our links"* or what?

*) I was getting a lot of these since I became DC member and my page went up in Google thanks to that.

[app103]

There is an old discussion here about this: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=9615.0

Bottom line...you are right about most of the awards being a scam to get you to link to their site. It boosts their Google page rank and gives you a bad rating in McAfee Site Advisor, for linking to sites that are known to have some malware infested downloads.

[fenixproductions]

Thanks app. I was thinking something along those lines.

[adi_barb]

there are many software directories out there that simply award software products in a random manner. you can distinguish the ones who really offer something serious if they download, install, test and then write reviews or articles about the awarded software. Some of them do this for free while others are asking huge amount of money for writing a simple review. I was asked even $700 for a simple review/blog post of 350 words for our "famous questions cms"

[fenixproductions]

@adi_barb
Since the only page I can see some downloads s Softpedia, I don't care about others.

I was just wondering about the way Internet is going to follow.