The Recursive ISV

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I’m not talking about MixAction.  That’s doing just fine, though I did manage to temporarily screw up this blog for half an hour today when adding a plugin.  It re-wrote CSS and other stuff that I’m pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do.   Lesson learned.  I now have WordPress installed on a VM locally and test plugin’s before installation.  ;-)  While I was at it I changed the theme.  Still not what I want, but it’s a theme with more space on the page, so it’s closer…

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I have an extremely low opinion of software download sites.  I blogged about them recently.  

Today a developer, Julian Moss , whom I mentioned had problems with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor posted an interesting result, which he admits was an accident, but none the less extremely relevant to ISV’s. 

Julian  explains that he created a PAD file as usual for submission to download sites for a recently released product.  He did the usual submissions,  accidentally deleted the content on his own site and used the PAD file description to replace that content.  It was then he noticed:

A while later, while I was purging some junk listings from the download site database, I must have accidentally removed the listing for Morse Machine. Because I was busy, I quickly reinstated it by recreating the page using the description from the PAD file. I thought no more about it until the other day when I happened to do a Google search for Morse Machine and found that my own listing of it appeared nowhere in the search results, even though the page has a good page rank. The top listing for my program was the one from Sofotex, at position 3, followed at position 5 by the one from Top Shareware. Both listings had the same description, taken from the PAD file, that I had used on my own page.

Hmm.  Sounding a bit like the conclusion I came to in the article I wrote, hey?  Not that the conclusion was rocket science, but it’s certainly noteworthy that Julian concludes:

The question this accidental experiment raises in my mind is, to what extent is it worth automatically submitting identical software listings to hundreds of download sites, if Google is going to filter most of them out because they contain the same text?

Right on.  Exactly.  So where is the SEO advantage here to the ISV?  I’d love it if somebody could explain that one.

But, to be fair it’s OK for people like me to bitch and moan and rattle.  But what’s an ISV to do?  Without the download site it’s tough to get top score in Google, right?

Not necessarily.  But that’s a post for another day.  I’m aiming for Sunday on that one as it deserves some attention to detail.

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative. - Kurt Vonnegut

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