What are these strange backlinks?

[Ant-Built]

Hello everyone!

Ive recently taken on a client that has a fairly large plumbing company. We're doing okay so far at almost number 10 on the local search for plumbers on google.

Our #1 competitor however.. has an interesting backlink profile that I simply cannot understand. They are linked and yes, the links are followed, from a bunch of comics? Heres an example of one of their links.

http://endlessorigami.com/comic/modern-day-fight-club-2/

moz reports that the link text says "Brooklyn Plumbing" .. Where are the links on these pages? I don't see a single link... how is this even related to a plumbing company? Im so puzzled, and it appears this is where the majority of the link juice is being passed to my competitor. There are at least 15 links that are just random comics..

Thank you everyone. I hope this isn't a silly question.

[RuthBurrReedy]

It looks like the links were on the pages when Moz' crawler crawled them, but have since been removed. The site you link to above mentions that they're having some WordPress problems, which is a clue.

What I suspect happened is that links to your competitor's site were part of some kind of link injection malware that was abusing some exploitable WordPress feature common to comics blogs. Often when a bot is injecting links to a bunch of sites onto vulnerable pages, some of those links will be the bot's "customers" - that is, people who have paid for their links to be put on a bunch of sites and aren't too picky about how they get there - and some will have just been pulled in to the mix so that the spammers can mask their client list. So it may not be that this is something your competitor was doing on purpose; it's hard to know for sure. Either way, it's far more likely to be bad news for their site than good news, but probably just won't have any effect one way or another. Since the links aren't there anymore, it's likely that the site owners caught and fixed the bug so those links disappeared.

If this was happening to your site, I'd recommend disavowing the sites in question and keeping an eye on your backlink profile for future weird links like these. Since it's happening for a competitor's site, though, you can just ignore those links entirely and focus on the backlinks of theirs that are actually relevant that you might want to pursue.