The Fight for SERP Traffic Prompts Site Operators to Mirror Sites
Why are there so many download sites on the Web? Actually, there aren't. Quite a few of them are duplicates in the sense that they operate using the same back-end database, are owned by the same individual or company, and may in fact be served from the same web server. The Association of Shareware Professionals maintains a list of shareware/freeware download sites at http://www.asp-shareware.org/users/searchsites.asp, but they are probably not aware that many of them are duplicate sites (a.k.a. mirror sites).
We added the sites listed at asp-shareware.org to TagTooga.com under the "PAD Submit Sites" category (Download Sites). The list is large, so we broke it up into 17 lists. When a URL gets added to TagTooga.com, the TagTooga servers immediately begin analyzing the page to collect information. One piece of information it looks for is a Google Adsense ID embedded within a Google Adsense advertisement. Sites using the same Adsense ID are most likely owned by the same entity. TagTooga.com is then able to display the sites associated with a specific Adsense ID.
Here's what we found after analyzing the download sites: See Results