Large Number of Links appearing in Google Webmaster Tools

[tomfifteen]

Hello,

In the last week we have noticed an extremely large number of backlink links appearing in Google Webmaster Tools.

One of the sites which links to us now have over 101,000 backlinks pointing to us, when in reality it should only have 300-600. We have check the websites have not been hacked, with hidden links etc, but we can not find any.

Has anyone else experienced problems with Google webmaster tools lately, displaying way too many links?

Or could this be a negative SEO attack, which is yet to emerge.

Thanks

Rob

[EGOL]

It could be a parameter problem.

For example.  You might have a page with this URL...  example.com/hiking/boots.html

But, google has found bad links to it like this.... (the crap after the ? is a parameter)

example.com/hiking/boots.html?sa=Xeiy7z8U5v5CsGgyQThyICgAg&amp

If you have a parameter problem you can...

use rel=canonical

Declare them in   Webmaster Tools >> Crawl >> URL parameters

Strip them off with htaccess and a 301 redirect

[eyepaq]

Hi Rob,

You can check in Web master tolls the exact source (as exact urls) for the source of the links. if all are coming from the same domain - there is a problem there. If you think those links are bad for you - just disavow the entire domain, one line - and problem solved.

If you need links from this domain, but "not that many" you should take it up with them to solve it.

However - for this "boiler plate" type of links - I wouldn’t worry that much. If there are some issues with the links, google will just ignore and won't count them.

Cheers.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It sounds to me like the site where the links are coming from could be at fault.

Do you know if they have made any changes recently? It is very easy for bad coding to produce thousands of pages that the site owners aren't even aware of (speaking from past experiences here). When you look at some of the pages where the links are coming from, do they look like nonsense pages?

It's a little difficult to tell exactly what is at fault without actually looking in more detail, but as this is just one site, it shouldn't cause you any issues - if it were an attack of some kind, then you would be seeing links from different domains, rather than just the one.

-Andy

[tomfifteen]

Hello,

Thank you for answering my question guys. I think it is a problem with a wordpress calender plugin, which is generating an large number of pages in the future, as follows,

calender/2014-12-28/

calender/2099-12-26/

Rob

[EGOL]

Thanks for the update.  Glad you got it figured out.