Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Keri! I think I'll take my questions over there.

Hi everybody,

I've recently noticed that we get a large proportion of referred traffic every month from a site nobody else at our company recognizes (eadgear.com.) The root page redirects to a different domain, and the page that is sending all of the referral traffic to our site is a members only page. I also can't sign up for an account without a referral ID. In short, it seems shady. This one site is sending us over 20% of our monthly referral traffic - all to our homepage, and with a 90% bounce rate. Is there a danger to our SEO positioning based on the high number of bounces being contributed here? Has anybody else seen something like this? And is there any sort of recourse we have if this is a problem?

Here are a few I've found (beware, I don't trust these links really):

http://download1.parallels.com/PPSMBE/10.2.0/unix/ai/parallels_installer_v3.5.2_build091201.14_os_FedoraCore_8_i386?mode=past&pn=22473

http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/03-Demographic_Profile/DPSF2010_Access.accdb?p=17259

http://suckerpunchmovie.warnerbros.com/videos/sp_banner.f4v?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8D%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AB%E3%83%96%E3%83%BC%E3%83%84%E6%AD%A3%E8%A6%8F%E5%93%81%E3%81%8C43%EF%BC%85OFF%EF%BC%81

I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.