Free Software Downloads

In the past couple of weeks, SofwareLode, a shareware downloads site has been growing in popularity. More and more pages are being pulled out of the supplemental index and the number of page views per day is now into the thousands.

There are a number of reasons for the increase in traffic.

• Being a shareware directory, SoftwareLode naturally builds links over time as authors link either to the homepage or to the details page for their software packages.
• As well as an increasing number of links, better internal linking has also helped. Each software details page now links to up to 10 related programs, i.e. programs with the same keywords. Getting more, relevant links to the program details pages helps pull pages out of the supplemental index.
• Better linking from the homepage into the rest of the site spreads the homepage PR around more efficiently. The homepage now lists top selections in a number of categories. The details pages for the top selections then link to related programs and so improve the rank of lots of the inner pages.

Breaking away from the usual software downloads site categories also seems to be showing some benefit. The antivirus software and free dvd software pages seems to be attracting a decent amount of traffic these days.

As SoftwareLode was launched only 7 months old, I'm pretty pleased with its performance and hopeful of further increases in traffic in the months ahead.