Open site explorer - Analysing competitors links

[CompleteOffice]

When using open site explorer to analyse my competitors links, when going through them, I would click them to have a look at them.

Almost all of the ones I clicked on something started to download on my computer and would be a blank page or the tab would disappear when the download begun.

What is this?

Why have they done this?

Is this bad practice?

Thanks

[AndreVanKets]

First thing that comes to mind is a link to a pdf or downloadable media. When you analyze the backlink, instead of viewing the page, you are downloading a document linked to.

I have come across this before, so no, not bad practice, the link is just something you download instead of view

GREG

[CompleteOffice]

OK that sounds reasonable. How would they get a backlink in a downloadable document?

[AndreVanKets]

Simple. Site A links to Site B

http://www.mysite.com/downloadable-media.pdf

The above is a URL on another website, so in essence, it is no different to a "normal" backlink. except that you download something, and don't view the page.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! This is actually a known issue with OSE. With the new deeper crawl that it is doing, it's finding a lot of downloadable program files and is getting confused and saying those binary files are actually links. SEOmoz is well aware of this and working on fixing the way the crawler works. It is nothing your competitors are doing, but a problem on the moz end of things. Carin has a detailed explanation in this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains.