What I’m thinking is that Google is encouraging webmasters to use “nofollow” correct? so, it’s natural that all webmasters will be moving to use that… to preserve their “PR” correct? but what happens at the end? I believe Google who depends mainly on external links to rank a website will have to ignore the “nofollow” eventually… otherwise, at the end, Google will not find any links to follow in a couple years …. am I correct?

For the first domain:

I didn’t do any other backlink work to it and since then I’ve gotten over 425 backlinks that show up in the Yahoo Explorer… that doesn’t include the backlinks that aren’t ’showing’, which is probably double to triple that.

Note that I did all of the captchas, which is a tedious process. There are over 60 if you submit to all of the sites (over 800, depending on your software category)

I also made sure to assign a category for each site, and did all of the verifications in my email.

For the second domain:

On another test for another domain I went the lazy route and just submitted to the sites that were auto-categorized and did not do the captchas. That site has about 100 backlinks… so there’s a major difference in DOING IT RIGHT vs. taking the easy route…

Out of all the backlinks that show up for both sites, I titled my software for my keyword phrase, and also used my keyword phrase as the company name. This was to give me the best shot at having anchor text backlinks…

Many of the sites will just link to your pad file, all to the download location, some the full URL of your homepage, and some will link via the anchor text of your software title and/or company name.

The amount of anchor text backlinks I got for the FULL TEST was few, about 10. Almost 2/3 of the backlinks are to the download location of the file or to the pad file, and most of the other 1/3 are direct links to your homepage without anchor text.

This is great though in my opinion for several reasons which I won’t go into full detail here…but basically it gives you a very diverse backlink foundation so that you can be even more aggressive with targeting your anchor text with backlinks from locations you have more control over (like blog comments, article directories, third party websites, social profiles, etc.)

I’m not going to share the URLs of these two sites, but I will say both rank well as 10 page websites for most of the keywords I was going after.

So, for $97 PromoSoft is a deal if you’re going to use it. That’s like $.25 a link if you only use it ONCE.

Hope that helps the doubters… no sandbox issues for me, either.

Cheers,

Scott

I am a programmer by trade and have created some simple applications that fit with my niche site. I have been submitting my PAD file with little results in terms of back links. Most of the sites if they are actually maintained only give a nofollow link anyway.

For all of those commenters that are worried about getting to many backlinks too fast, I think it’s really just an old wife’s tale. Firstly, if (hypothetically speaking) someone of great importance was assassinated and one site broke the story…they’d have 100,000’s of backlinks created within hours, and Google would in NO WAY penalize that site. Quite the contrary. If you publish software available for download that becomes rather popular and 1,200 backlinks are created (even if it’s in one day), who are they to know whether or not you advertised all over the nation with flyers stuck to windshields in Wal*Mart parking lots? Unless they can tell that you are using software and submitting enmass without site owner’s knowledge (unlikely) you won’t be penalized.

I think the commenter above, Jason, perhaps was using some other blue/black hat methods to get backlinks/traffic that may have put him over the edge.

If you are still worried about it, consider submitting a few press releases regarding the software around the net, prior to adding the backlinks. I might also create a page on the site just to talk about the “amazing promotion efforts” of your “team” thanking them about your successful launch of the software - specify a “launch date” that you will use the software to get the backlinks! lol Good luck everyone, and thank you so much Eli. My husband found your site last night and send me a link this morning. He’s a PPC guy, but I do SEO for all his AM landing pages. I’ll definitely be reading more of what you have here…

Thanks for great post!