Low value link building to sitemap.xml

[DougRoberts]

During some competitive research recently I discovered one of my clients competitors sites had an interesting backlink profile.

Looking at the top-pages report in Open Site Explorer the home page was the #1 page (as you'd expect) with 2.5k links from about 500 linking root domains

The second page was the sitemap.xml (~1.5k links, 400 linking root domains) and the third was their /feed page (again, ~1.5k links, 350 linking root domains).

Links to these two pages aren't something that would happen naturally (particularly the sitemap.xml).

There's a whole load of evidence for nasty low quality link building such as over-optimised keyword rich anchor text, comment spam, and even some blog/article based link networks.

It's a pretty nasty niche with lots of cut-throat affiliate marketing.

My guess here is that someone may have made a mistake using an automated link building too, but I'd be interested in what you might think? Have you seen this before?

(Sorry, I can't reveal the domains in question as I'm bound by an NDA.)

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hey Doug,

Never seen that myself before and can only imagine it is either a mistake, or someone has been misinformed that there is some benefit to this.

Like you said, these aren't links that would appear naturally, so something odd has certainly happened.

-Andy

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Doug,

I have never seen this done before and as both you and Andy say I can't imagine that it has been done on purpose - more automated link building.

[DougRoberts]

Thanks Matt, Andy,

Looking at how they've had automated link building done to every page on their domain it does look like it's automated link building gone wrong.

You don't normally see so many boring product pages getting as many links as they have!

It wouldn't surprise me if were trying to supply the sitemap.xml or rss feed as a list of target URLs to build links to and ended up building links directly to these.