Strange baclinks

[540SEO]

I'm helping out a friend with his legal blog, and in checking OSE I found scores of backlinks that appear paid, but he says they've done no link buying at all.  Here are a couple of examples:

http://solidinspiration.com/odhkj/degry.php?b=317022
http://retservilo.com/wzkuz/koex.php?u=391050

They don't look like the typical paid link sites because of the number of links on the page, and the fact they're not all hyperlinked and anchor text.  Almost looks like hacked sites.  Stranger still, they point to the non-www version of the site, and they have non-www redirected to www.

Anyone seen this before?

Thanks --

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Keith,

I have seen it, for a hobby site of mine (well, my fathers business but...). we have certainly never bought those kind of links, it's relatively non competative but sure enough, loads of weird pages with names like xhsdfadsfa.php with scores of links in the footer, usually with the site name or URL as the anchor.

I could not tell you why they exist or what purpose they have for the creators but I have seen it before.

This site has been around for 8 or so years so... it's certainly had time to pick up these oddities, that's for sure.

No answer there, but you are not the only one in this situation and my advice is to just ignore them, they do no good and are most likely ignored completely by G & co.

Cheers!
Marcus

[SteveOllington]

Did your friend:

1. Purchase the domain which was held previously by someone else, or

2. Hire somebody to build links for him at some point.

[540SEO]

No -- no link building and they bought the domain.

[SteveOllington]

Then the only thing, unlikely as it is, that I can imagine is that for some reason somebody somewhere put those links up for him. Maybe it's a mis-spell of a similar domain that did buy links. Or, again unlikely, it could be that the person who owns the linking sites is selling links and put a bunch on there to random sites to show as an example. I've been emailed by companies from India showing me URL's to sites like that saying "Look, you can have a link in here too" as if it were a good thing lol.

[RyanPurkey]

Looks like a scraper program that either hacked or bought up old domains and is creating self-referential link farms. Your friend might have purchased a domain that was part of this network and now there are still links out there pointing to him.  Dunno exactly.  You could check out the ownership history in DomainTools.com

I've seen things like this before but not this exact scenario.  Wacky!

Is your friend having trouble getting his blog to rank?

[Marcus_Miller]

There is clearly some kind of nefarious purpose here and it certainly looks like a spam link or hacked link network but the point is, I have seen this for sites that I know are not hacked like the one I mentioned above. Whether they are targets, or have been hacked historically and it never came off or something else entirely, the only point worth mentioning is to ignore them.

If you are certain the site is not hacked, then these links will do no good or no bad, they will just be ignored and any time you spend trying to figure this out is time you could better spend on some other, positive tasks to improve this site.

[MarieHaynes]

It certainly looks like paid link spam from this end.  As others have mentioned, is it possible that someone was building links to another similarly spelled domain and mis-spelled it?  Or, it's possible that the domain name was previously owned by someone else and this is the remnants of an old link building campaign?

Neither of these pages have PR, so if they were pages built solely to sell links it was likely done while ago and the pages have since lost their PR.

[SebastianDyer]

Maybe someone is trying to sabotage his site by giving him a bad link profile? Would seem strange though if he isn't very established and isn't a major rival to anyone.

As others mentioned, could be a hack or just software that aggregates links from random places.

[JeanYates]

This happened to me and it has been a nightmare. Our google rankings have tanked, the quality scores on our pages in adwords have tanked, and our several dozen top three organic links from the very best keywords for our market have dumped below our competitor.

Coincidentally, our main competitor has taken over the top positions that we used to hold. And he recently hired a firm to get him "guaranteed top positions on your keywords." And his incoming links have increased, mostly from places that you pay to get links from, but still, after ten years of no links in, he's gotten more than we have (real links, not the 250,000+ spam links. I can't help but wonder if this is a new method of trashing the top ranking sites. And I don't have a clue how to stop it.

I haven't contacted google, thinking that it happened around the time of Panda and we needed to make changes, but it's getting worse and worse. Now google is showing "block all results from this site" option when our results are shown.

If anyone has managed to recover from this mess, I'd love to hear about it. We've been online since 1997, still get over 5000 unique visits a day, and have lots and lots of great original content. I've never used black hat methods, never even used Adwords as we've had such good organic rankings.

[MarieHaynes]

Are you sure that your site's decline is because of a penalty because a competitor placed backlinks to your site from a poor neighborhood?  If your rankings fell around the time of Panda, then I would think Panda would be the culprit and not a few suspicious backlinks.

Additionally, your backlink profile should have nothing at all to do with your Adwords Quality Scores as far as I know.

[JeanYates]

Hi Dunamis -

I just don't know, and I don't want to blame my competitor. But the 250,000 crappy links from sites with home pages loaded with hundreds of  links and pictures of Lady gaga happened almost to the day of our rankings tanking. And no google update has ever effected us nearly as much. And my other site that shares hundreds of links back and forth to this one on a similar topic was virtually uneffected.  (It does not have the treash links.)

I fully take responsibility for the possibility that I need to improve the site for google, but I still wonder about the huge number of bad neighborhood links going into the site.And the coincidental dump in rankings.

Oh, I didn't  mention, the links appear and reappear. One day they are not there, then they are back a few days later.

Thanks so much for any suggestions.

[MarieHaynes]

It may be a good idea to start a new thread to ask about this.  That's really weird that the links come and go.

I would still guess that Panda is the problem for your ranking woes though.

[PathMarketing]

I'd echo the suggestion to start a new thread on this, we've all theorized about this and I've also heard it mentioned directly from an industry guru as a tactic he knew was being employed by some - and working. It would be great to have us all analyze and pick this apart to see how and why it's happening. In theory sites should be able to avoid being "hurt" by this kind of thing, just not helped, with the reason being that as we know, anyone could blast anyone else with bad links. But what is apparently happening is not simply these spammy links being discounted, but a penalty actively being imposed, which goes against what most of us have heard and believed until recently. Would love to see some of the great minds here take a crack at it.

-Dan