Really weird crawl errors - Mozzer detectives, please help me!

[CommT]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a really strange problem.

I just checked webmaster tools crawl error report. I have no errors on 'the web' report, but there are loads of 'blocked' urls on the smartphone report.

When I downloaded the CSV it appears that Google has put a completely different domain on the urls (correct url: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/about-us/definitions/ the incorrect url in the downloaded report: http://www.domex-uk.co.uk/about-us/definitions/) - there are over a hundred of these, I won't obviously copy them all in, I just wanted to show you an example. All of them are 'blocked'.

I have asked my IT department to look into this as I suppose there could have been a DNS error, but it seems extremely unlikely.

I've checked out this Domex UK site, and they appear to be a legitimate company. They are in a completely different industry to us (they fix household appliances, we are a mortgage broker) which is why I don't believe they've done anything wrong - what could they possibly gain by doing something so odd?

Do you think this is just an error on Google's part, or should I be suspicious of spam attacks. We have no manual actions or security issues, and never have.

My web developer is as confused by this as I am.

Has anyone else experienced this sort of problem? If you did, what did you do to overcome it?

Thank you for reading, and for helping!

Best wishes,

Amelia xxx

[AlanMosley]

I did a crawl of your site using the Bing API and found many external links, but none to domex-uk.co.uk, I think this is a google error.

you do have a huge amount of external links, you are giving away a lot of link juice.

[CommT]

Thank you Alan.

My IT guy says he thinks one of our developers did the domex site (their contact page is pretty similar to ours) but as the chap in question is on holiday for a week, we'll have to await his return for confirmation of this. IT says that it would be a problem with the xml sitemaps in that our original xml would have had the domex domain in the front (I checked the xmls when we launched and there were no errors, so I think he may be wrong on this front, but we'll see...). The dev who actually did the xmls is not on holiday and says he has nothing to do with Domex - I even said he wouldn't be in trouble (he wouldn't be) if it was his error. Curiouser and curiouser!

Yes, we provide a lot of external links to other useful resources - such as our Trust Pilot page (we're the top broker on Trust Pilot).

I don't think providing Googlebot with a route to other sites is necessarily a bad thing - in fact it's better than being a dead-end in my opinion.

Our listings haven't suffered by linking out - I think linking out to relevant and useful sites can only be a good thing for the visitors if the context is right. We never link out anywhere dodgy (porn, gambling, viagra) so I can't see a major problem with the links we do provide to other sites.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me, and for your concern over the outward links. I do appreciate your input, even if we have differing views on linking out!

Best wishes,

Amelia

[AlanMosley]

Linking out gives away link juice. That's how PageRank works. Someone links to you, they give you some of their PageRank, you link to someone you give them some.

Matt cuts once said it can be beneficial to link out but did not elaborate. I believe he means as a user experience. But the google PageRank algorithm shows you give away PageRank