Award sites

Are website awards worth having

[Leon_Walton]

I am trying to increase the link popularity of my site and had heard from other threads that getting awards can help. I know awards have fallen out of vogue at the moment. However I am willing to try almost anything to increase my links

Can any one help out with advice on Award sites and the usefulness

[richlowe]

I run an awards program which offers 8 different awards. I find it very fulfilling as I view awards as a kind of peer review program. This gives me the opportunity to get into communication with other webmasters, check over their sites and reward those that meet my criteria.

As far as traffic, yes, I've found awards to be reasonably good traffic builders. You do, however, have to spend a fair amount of time on your program.

As far as the other side of the coin, receiving awards, that can be a traffic builder as well. If you apply for an award, the person giving the award presumably, at least, visits your site. Whether this turns into sales or not? Who knows.

Personally, I think properly run awards programs are wonderful. Poorly run programs are like most poorly run things in life - poor.

Richard Lowe

[Leon_Walton]

rich

thank you for the advise. maybe you can sticky mail me your url so i can have a look at your award program

[rogerd]

One word of caution - I tend to be paranoid about Google and links, and I would avoid any award program that looks like a link farm. Many awards are completely unselective - i.e., you fill in a form, and you get your "award" immediately. Usually, the award site specifies that you must place the award graphic on your site, with a link to their site. That's the part that worries me - if you are linked to a site that Google ends up identifying as a spam site, you could get penalized.

My advice: stick to smaller, selective award programs (perhaps in your market) and check the PR of the award site to make sure they haven't already been busted. Avoid automatic awards.

It's too bad that one needs to worry about stuff like this, but with the PR0 death penalty hovering out there (and the reasons for the penalty not fully known), you can't be too careful.

[Lisa]

If you are not willing to write a 500 word article on the website then don't give them an award. An award should mean something. I think visitors will take your award program more seriously if you do the above.

[Leon_Walton]

any one know any good awards to get

[EliteWeb]

Leon it depends on what type of site yours is there are many different award sites on the net which cater to all genres of web sites.

Personally I created my own awards and gave them to other webmasters ;)

[Leon_Walton]

elite

thats quite sneaky and a good idea thanks.

my website is the shop front for a web devlopment company

[EliteWeb]

Try for website design awards or just make an award site with a spiffy elite design and make catagories for the awards to be given to, have a submission form so they can submit their site. heheh then link yer site to it, give yer awards to other players. ;)

[rcjordan]

I think authentic awards or citations have another benefit, and that's encouraging others to link to you. While I don't participate in any awards program, I do have one website that occasionally gets a nice article or paragraph in the online press and other "name brand" websites. I gathered up a sampling of these, made a "hey-somebody-loves-us" page and linked it prominently to every page throughout the site. The links (without requests for reciprocals, btw) are growing daily.

[richlowe]

A good place to look for quality awards is Award Sites:

[awardsites.com...]

Richard Lowe

[Eric_Jarvis]

I mostly go for specialist awards...they bring extra traffic...but mostly they make our sponsors very happy indeed

getting Cool Site of the Day gave us several thousand extra vistors over two days and a long lasting gain of 20-30 a day