Cleaning up link profile

[Entrusteddev]

I've recently been trying to tidy up my link profile. We have been link building for a number of years and I decided to check it out and see how good our profile looks.

I used OSE to give me a report of all external links pointing to pages on my www sub-domain. The results are scary!

I have hundreds of links point to my site that originate from URLs such as the following url which attempts to start a download, use caution!!!

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| http://ftp.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/cxlinux/demo/install-crossover-pro-demo-9.0.1.sh?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=減量 |

Another example (this one attampts to start a .jar download!! Be cautious)

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| http://www.breastreconstructionguide.com/compare.jar?page=1892&username=DXDZSW |

All the other metrics reported for the offending URLs seem ok, such as PA and DA. Also, many have meaningful page titles (as opposed to random characters) and nicely formed anchor text.

What I'd like to know is;

Are these links having a detrimental effect on my SERPs?

How does OSE find them since its a URL to a download?

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks for your time.

Regards

Aran

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[NerdsOnCall]

Hi Aaron,

First let me say that sometimes competitors will try to point spammy links to your site (they hope that the bad links will hurt your serps). Usually this will backfire on competition, and the links can actually help your serps.  If you have a healthy domain age, and other legitimate links pointing to your site, Google shouldn't penalize you.

My best guess is that Google will just ignore the links that are low quality, but I don't think they will actually hurt you.

You can always submit a Google Webmaster Spam Report from your webmaster's account. Just explain to Google that you were not involved in setting up the links, and the you did not pay for them, nor do you endorse them.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Aran,

First, Don't Panic! You're actually seeing a bug in Linkscape/OSE that we're working on eliminating. What's happening is that as we make deeper crawls, the crawler is finding more downloadable files and chocking on them, and wrongly categorizing them as links. One of the Linkscape engineers has a good explanation over on this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains.

Hope this helps, and so sorry for the confusion.

[Entrusteddev]

Thanks Keri, any ideas when the crawler will be bug free?

Its no fun trawling through thousands of links to weed out the dodgy data before I can rpesent the info to a client.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Aran,

Some of the links are gone from this latest crawl, more will be gone in November, and they should be almost all gone by December. See Rand's post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update.

As I noted in the September index update, we have had some serious issues when crawling deeper on large domains and encountering binary files that contain code our crawler recognizes and treats as a link. To help stop this problem, we applied a black list to this index to stop a large number of the files folks had reported to us (our estimate is that ~40% of binary files are now removed). However, we know there's still more than a few of these in the database of links so we'll continue cranking away on solutions to remove them all. Our hope is to have them reduced in the next index (November) and nearly eliminated by the December index. If you're ever curious about the next/previous updates, you can always see data for them on our Linkscape calendar.