Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?

[motosantiago]

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!

[Nobody1560986989723]

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.

[motosantiago]

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

[Nobody1560986989723]

You're welcome. Anything else I could help with? (If not could you mark this as answered, please?).

Thanks,

Martin