Software piracy is a fact of life for vendors of desktop software. Take a look at Google’s helpful suggestions if you search on the name of one of my products:

Trying to make your software crack-proof is a fools errand. But one simple thing you can do is create a ‘honeypot’ page to try to convert people searching for a cracked version of your software. If you search for a crack for my software, here is what comes up in first place:

Yep, it’s a page on my website. If you click the link you will be taken through to a page explaining the (very real) dangers of downloading cracks and why you should buy a licence. I did some basic on-page SEO to get it to rank for my product name and terms such as ‘crack’, ‘keygen’ and ‘warez’. Then I linked to it from the website sitemap. Nothing clever, but it works. I have averaged a sale per month for the last 10 years from people clicking through onto this page. Given the inadequacies of conversion tracking, the real number of sales could be significantly higher. And it didn’t take long to create the page.

I can’t remember where the idea for a honeypot page came from, but it wasn’t my idea. Feel free to make a version of the page for your own product, but please don’t copy the exact wording. That would be copyright infringement. ;0)