Every week, I hear from businesses who’ve received a mysterious email or Direct Message on social media, telling them they’ve “won” an award or been “rated one of the top providers” in their industry.

It sounds flattering, but here’s the reality: you haven’t entered anything, you haven’t been judged by an expert panel, and you haven’t actually won an award.

What you’ve received is a cleverly disguised scam, it’s a tactic designed to exploit your website, build someone else’s domain value, and it will damage your brand’s credibility.

How the Fake Award Scams Work

These websites create what look like lovely award badges or even review rankings, often using your business name scraped from public directories. Then, they email you with a congratulatory message, offering you an HTML badge to place on your website or even charging you for a “winner’s certificate.”

STOP The badge or image they give you is embedded with a backlink. This is a hidden bit of code that links your website to theirs.

This means:

• Every time you place that badge on your website, you’re giving their website SEO power, not yours (you might have heard this called giving ‘link juice' or ‘link farming')
• When they repeat this tactic with hundreds or thousands of businesses, their website rapidly gains domain authority.
• Eventually, they can sell or switch that domain to something entirely different – such as gambling, cannabis, or adult content – and/or sell it for $000s… and guess what – every business that linked to them ends up connected to that site too. Yes, that includes yours.

This is not only deceptive and unethical, it’s dangerous for your SEO.

Google is constantly monitoring link quality, and if your site is seen to be linking to spammy, irrelevant, or low-quality domains, your own search engine rankings can drop as a result.

How to Spot and Avoid Fake Awards

• If you haven’t entered it, you haven’t won it. Reputable awards have a clear and transparent entry process and judging criteria.

• Do a background check. Look for a legitimate awards website, credible judges, media coverage, entrants, and transparency on entry and judging processes.

• Don’t put unknown badges on your site. If you’re offered a badge or backlink out of the blue, ask yourself: What’s in it for them?

• Check the backlink. Hover over the badge or link – if it points to a domain you’ve never heard of, or one that’s vague or unrelated to your industry, avoid it. Even if it looks like an awards website, if you didn’t enter it, bin it.

• Protect your reputation and rankings. Every link from your site should serve your audience and support your brand’s credibility.

This is not the only scam that around.

There is also the “we want to feature you in our magazine” scam – which results in a hefty price for vanity content that at best only costs you money, at worst, costs you significant credibility.

Then there are the awards website clones – yes, even the most prestigious awards in the world have suffered from these!

PLEASE check the URL you are clicking on – and if you’re not sure, just like all the banking scams, go and find your own link for a specific award rather than using one sent to you.

Real awards offer genuine recognition, judged by experts, and earned through effort – not gifted for ‘free' in a cold email.

I’m working hard on reducing this problem through the work we do at August Recognition, and now through an AI awards platform that I’m building with Daniel Priestley and our incredible team of tech, awards, and finance experts Marcus Quinn Charlotte Daborn and David B Horne

Our platform, AwardsApp will find and recommend the best awards and categories for your business, and contains only approved awards programmes.

Safe, secure, and smart. That’s what we’re building, and that's what you need to be anytime you enter an award.

We'd love you to join our presentation and see how it works – just click here to join the waitlist.

Remember – be proud of the recognition you’ve truly achieved, and don’t let a fake badge compromise the trust you’ve built with your customers or damage your SEO.

If you’re ever unsure whether an award is legitimate, feel free to reach out to me. I’ve spent over a decade helping businesses win credible awards that actually make a positive difference to their brand, team and future business.

Please share this article and help us stop the scams. Knowledge is power!

PS. A couple more pointers: If an award doesn’t have a live ceremony, that doesn’t mean it’s fake – many international awards operate this model to be able to service international competitors without the time and expense of travel. Still do your due diligence checks.

And yes, you can expect to pay to play, put NEVER pay to win! Awards event businesses do have operating costs just like you do – some awards are free to enter when they are covered by sponsors or memberships, but mostly entry fees should be used ethically to run the event and business operations.

Good luck on your awards journey. Stay Safe.