Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
What impact does multiple links from the same c-block have on SEO?
Recently there's been a move made in my company to only allow backlinks from websites on different c-block IP addresses. The most links we have from one c-block is 15. There is a wide variety of other IP addresses linking to our site as well. My question is - do we need to be so restrictive with using websites from the same c-block as long as the neighbourhood is good and we're not linking sites with full identical IPs (matching d-block as well)?
Link Building | | LawMarketingYLF0 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Does an external link to an image file on my site help my SEO?
I found a few websites that are displaying images from my site. Curiously, they have also linked these images to the source image file on my website. I found these because Moz showed these sites in my list of backlinks. I assume that means it impacts my Domain Authority. But does this actually help me in search engines since it's not linking to a page on my site?
Link Building | | AlexLenhoff0 -
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | | chaudhary04890 -
Are links with space considered to be the same as links with %20?
I wonder if Google would consider those three links to be the same? http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test page.html http://www.example.com/test+page.html
Link Building | | lucek0 -
Inbound links from porn sites into a professional business services site - remove help?
The website in question was hacked four years ago and there was porn on the servers. It was used as a peer to peer torrent streamer. The images were deleted. We have just found inappropriate inward bound links (with great link juice!!) - how can we remove these links - or should we? any advice would be appreciated thanks
Link Building | | GardenBeet0