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In order to truly get potential answers to these questions we would need the domain in question. Without it all we could offer is guesses.

As for how to determine penalty, if it is a manual penalty you will see notice in Google Webmaster Tools. Login to your account and find the manual action section as well as the notifications section. However, if it is an algorithmic penalty you will likely not see anything here.

There's a good chance whoever you "contracted" did black-hat SEO tactics and built poison links. This would be the most likely scenario. I could tell you for sure if you gave me the domain... But that'd be my guess from the limited information offered here. I'd definitely fire them ASAP either way if you haven't already.

Yeah. I believe it was Ian Lurie @ Portent who said "FB needs to hire this guy"

Here's a fun Facebook hacker story http://rt.com/news/facebook-post-exploit-hacker-zuckerberg-621/#.UhJPVHjA3Q8.twitter

Interesting thanks for that info..

I've dug into all of these URLs and yeah I noticed that they were referrals as well.. tried to get into any/all of them and have yet to find even one with a link to our domain.

3 days later and I'm still baffled. Haven't seen these links show up on any other reports (ahrefs, OSE)

The good news is I haven't seen any of my rankings hurt yet either.

something happened and my last post didn't go i'll try again..

So this morning these links are all still showing in GWT and nowhere else. They don't show up when I download the latest links CSV... But when I go to the links in GWT I see this "via intermediate URL" thing.. Does anybody know what that means? Here's what it looks like: http://gyazo.com/13f45a6978ee9bfbab046cfb74cebc2f.png

Thank you Carson!! You're awesome.

Thank you this is helpful.

Although I wish this thread wasn't marked "Answered" as nothing has been answered here... I'm looking through as Googlebot and seeing nothing different. I'm going to wait a few days and see if this changes.

But if it does not I would like the "Answered" marking removed so that others will be more likely to contribute advice.

I do appreciate all of the advice given so far, however. Thank you for that.

That would most likely be alright, depending on the frequency of which you receive the links and where they are coming from.

To be perfectly safe your best bet is still to no-follow these links and I probably would if I were you...

This is very helpful, thanks Clever. I'll keep you posted on what I find.

Oh and to answer your first question, no our traffic data looks identical to average.

Interesting. So I don't have a licensed version of Screaming Frog which means I can't change the user agent.

You say you used a plug-in to spider sites as a Google bot with Chrome? Can you direct me to this plugin?

Would it be plausible for these types of cloaking links to be sunk into sites like yahoo, cnbc, etc? Seems odd... Or as a "hack" how does it work.. if our server was hacked how would it report backlinks from other domains. Oh man my brain is fried already and it's only 9:22am

Yeah I use tools like that on Chrome and also the moz bundle of tools. Literally haven't found one single page reported in GWT that actually contains a link to my site.

I keep thinking I'm still in some sort of bad dream this morning and any minute I'll wake up in my bed. Don't imagine one of yous guys can give me a virtual slap in the face, can ya?!

Yes that could potentially look unnatural seeing as how they're built quickly and in mass numbers as well as all having the same anchor text.

From the looks of things, the majority of your anchor texts are keyword phrases. OSE reports it as "appointment scheduling software ..." and the margin is pretty wide over your actual brand.

I would definitely change the anchor text to your brand for these mass links, and you might want to consider no-following them as well.

Hi Oscar,

Thanks for the response. I agree that display ads shouldn't do this I just can't figure out what else would cause it. I've certainly never seen anything like it. I've gone through about 50-60 of the URLs reporting links in GWT now and not a single one of them have any links to my domain. I can confirm this easily by viewing source and searching for our domain within. Nothing...

Some of the URLs are actually print versions of news articles that don't have any links at all on them.

What in the world.. This has to be a fluke. Perhaps the manual action notice is unrelated and this will go away? I don't even know where to begin with this..

As I said, no other tool is reporting these links, only GWT..>!

I just downloaded the "latest links" CSV report from GWT and it gave me a ton of domains reporting links to my domain... But when I go to these URLs there are no links to my domain. They are like, news articles on CNBC about NASDAQ activity and the such..

I'm wondering if my AdWords Display campaign has anything to do with this? The only consistency I'm seeing in these links is that there are display ads (haven't seen one of my own on there but surely the potential exists)...

I recently separated our Display & Search campaign and made a Display ad separate to our regular search ads.. Do you think this could have something to do with it? If so, WHY!? Why would these count as links in GWT?

Okay so this morning I logged into webmaster tools and saw this notice of manual penalty for "unnatural links" affecting "some incoming links." (see attached photo) This is a different notification than I've seen before.

Keep in mind this website had been building unnatural links up until I took over in December of 2012. I have since cleaned up a TON of them and thought I was making progress... Until this morning that is.

So the next thing I did was head over to the incoming links in GWT. What I saw here shocked me. Whereas the last time I checked (maybe 2 days ago) we had approx 6,000 links we now had 195,565 !!! WTF?!?! Okay so somebody is screwing with us, right?

But here's the real confusion: I can't find any of these links anywhere else other than GWT. As you can see on the other attachment I have included, Google is reporting some 39,000 links from a domain called "itbriefing.net" however when I search this domain I find absolutely zero of these links. There are a few mentions of our brand but not one single link.

Also, looking through ahrefs.com and OSE I don't see any of the data that GWT is reporting here; everything looks normal to me.

Now isn't GWT the last to report all of these changes? What could possibly be happening here? Am I losing my mind?

We are still being indexed although I've been frustrated trying to get one of our main keywords to re-rank. This was one that had the most poison links built over the years so recently I gave up and changed the URL of the page completely sans redirect. This worked, and GWT reported a ton of lost links (99% of which were poison and the other 1% of which I regained with the new URL).

But now this.

Is this a GWT fluke? Am I under attack? What is going on.. Please weigh in on this one as I'm baffled.

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Well I'm not too familiar with joomla but it has something to do with how your site is set up within the CMS tool you're using.

What is that Diane Walker page? An author page? I'd start by getting to the bottom of what it is and where/how it's drawing content. There aren't any titles on it? What's the deal with that page it looks terrible... Is it auto-generated or did you make it?

I don't know Joomla but if you can't find the answers to this then you should contact their support team or find a Joomla forum. That is of course if you can't get the answer from anybody here. There may be someone floating around with Joomla experience.

But you must be able to get into the settings of this page and fix this somehow... you must

http://moz.com/mozcon-live/agenda

If you've removed the links in question then you should be fine and there is no reason to disavow. I am totally afraid of the disavow tool and use it as a last ditch effort only. If the data hasn't been updated it may be because your removal happened recently and these tools take awhile to update.

If those links aren't physically there then you will be fine no matter what the backlink tools report.

I actually did read that through before beginning and it was very helpful, thank you.