Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
-
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site.
The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO?
The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point.
Thanks for any help!
-
You're welcome. Anything else I could help with? (If not could you mark this as answered, please?).
Thanks,
Martin
-
Thanks for the info Martin. Your answer echos my hunch (albeit unsupported). If Google is moving more and more toward user interaction metrics, one would imagine that links to these .exe files would be beneficial for the overall site authority.
Thanks again,
James
-
Does the website owner mind hotlinks like this? I don't think 301-ing them to a real web page would be bad in the eyes of Google. I think if purposeful pages that better describe the downloads and are useful resources for the visitors then that may be a better way to harness the links for SEO. As for whether links to .exe's is good for SEO, the file itself won't rank, but it may help domain authority. I'm not wholly sure so I'd like another opinion on this. And as an aside, the .exe's shouldn't be directly downloadable due to secure reasons, best to zip the files anyway as some anti viruses may block .exe downloads. So if you create some new downloads in ZIP files, redirect the .exe URLs to useful pages then you should benefit from the links. I'd like to see if others have tested this out however.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
Do any presentation sites, Slideshare, Google Slides, HaikuDeck offer great SEO links?
I do a lot of public speaking and normally upload my slides somewhere so people can access later. With most sites I can upload to Slideshare or similar, then embed into my own site. I do it for audience convenience, but it would be swell to get an SEO bump.
Link Building | | julie-getonthemap0 -
What's the best seo link building company after May 2013?
Which is the best and most trustworthy seo company if I want to outsource my link building after being severely hit by the google penguin 4 update?
Link Building | | naimelhajj0 -
Best way to build inbound links?
Recently I learned that there are links that are nofollow that google doesn't consider part of SEO. I was curious to know and also to help other new users what the community thinks the best practices are in growing your inbound links. Thank you for all the responses. I hope this link has served to help new users recently introduced to SEO and link building.
Link Building | | johnmoon61 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Google Webmaster Tools - assessing inbound links
Hello, I am terribly confused by Google Webmaster Tools. I am looking at my inbound links, to see which content on the site is strongest. However, the results from GWT under Links to your site, and the results from doing a link: search in Google yield very different results! For example, in GWT, this page on our site apparently 2237 links from 29 different domains. But when I search link:www.nigelsecostore.com/acatalog/Eco_Stapler.html, I get just three results, two of which are from our site. What is the cause of the disparity between the two results, or is it just my (lack of) understanding of what I am seeing in the Links to your site report in GWT? Any help clearing this up gratefully received! Many thanks, Sophy
Link Building | | sophycolbert0 -
When new links to site do we see DA improve right away?
If I get a new link from a external site with a high DA, will it show has soon has the link is available on the referring site? My new site as NO Domain Authority, I guess a link with a DA of 83 will in-cress it.
Link Building | | BigBlaze2050