I was web browsing and looking at different distros donation page i found something peculiar on linux mint donation page. If we look at list of donors published on the website there are many 1 $ donors with hyperlinks to professional services, other than personal blogs. This gets me wondering could it be that it is done to increase page ranking of such professional services (SEO).
I am not judging, i am a utilitarian, but just putting my observation and if true, i hope could be useful to many.
It is nice to see small (and large businesses) support the distribution that they depend on, so I suppose there's no harm in donators linking to their business if Linux Mint allows that. This might only become an issue if it's spam or fraudulent.
Historically, around 2014-2017, Ubuntu MATE did compile a monthly blog report on donations. However, these were taken down because of GDPR and full names/amounts being "personal data".
What would be the purpose? Page rank numbers mean nothing, even Distrowatch admits that. Linux OS's are usually free or for a donation you want to make. . If anything it might be for a bit for free publicity for those donating, hoping other Linux users might be interested in their services.