Bot Boosted App Store Rankings Will Get Developers Banned

[engine]

Apple has warned that any bot boosted Apps in its App Store will get the developer booted out of the program.
Bot Boosted App Store Rankings Will Get Developers Banned [bbc.co.uk]

Apple has warned that any developers found to be artificially inflating the rankings of apps will be kicked off the App Store.

It follows a developer blowing the whistle on the practice of using automated PCs - known as bot farms - to push apps up the charts.

The anonymous developer said that it was common practice to pay bot farms to inflate rankings.

Meanwhile, Google's attempts to clean up its app store have been questioned.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Sounds familiar to SERP rank discussions... canning 'everyone above you' may be harder but will be the next best exploit.

[Marketing Guy]

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System: The following 4 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/foo/4415855.htm [webmasterworld.com] by lawman - 6:01 pm on Feb 9, 2012 (est -5)

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[bbc.co.uk...]

Have you ever heard of such an unscrupulous practice? :)

[Marshall]

Hmm, cheat to make money. No, can't imagine that. ;)

Marshall

[rocknbil]

Heh. Look at the RFP's on some of the freelancing sites for "buyers" requesting any number of positive product reviews, inbound links, "unique articles," "respun articles," or even "page likes." You can buy anything, which is what makes testimonials and reviews such a worthless asset by which to judge a product or service.

The one that gripes me the most is respun articles. "Take the content from this site and respin it so it's unique." Translation: steal it and make it so I can't get caught. The reason this bugs me so much is the web has always been about content, and when you hunt down a topic you find there's generally one authoritative answer and the rest are gross regurgitations of the original. This floods the web with bombast and it sucks.

[lucy24]

"It must be true because I found several hundred different web sites all talking about it."

... and by weird coincidence, they all said it in exactly the same words.