Useless Inbound links

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Useless Inbound links

nomis5

8:02 pm on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

I signed up to Google alerts for one of my sites a couple of weeks ago. True to form, I get daily alerts about which sites are newly linking to mine. The vast majority of the new sites linking in though are all in the same format and seem to be pointless links.

Each page linking in consists of snippets from 10 to 15 sites with the url address. The sites quoted are all about the same type of subject. The top level page of the site linking to mine is, in most cases, totally unrelated to the links page.

The font and format of the pages linking to mine are all the same, boring, no pictures and no structure. Just a snippet and an outward link.

Has anyone else seen inbound links like this? Could they damage my site because there are so many of them and of no real value? Any help would be appreciated.

mayest

9:18 pm on Feb 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

I see them as well. Lately it seems that most of them are from various .nl domains. I usually don't even check them out if the domain doesn't seem likely to be worthwhile.

I checked out the source code for a couple of the sites in my recent alerts (with NoScript on). Basically, it looks like a regular links page, but they have a link to some JavaScript that starts with "eval(unescape(".

I don't know how to decode the script, but I don't trust it. If anybody can decode it, I'd like to know what the script is doing.

rocknbil

3:39 am on Feb 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

For mayest:

Try this search on this site [google.com], you will find that these are sites that have been hacked.

Before I venture the next thought, take a step back, I COULD BE WRONG. Seems to me that if these sites are linking to you, and being linked to you via this malicious code, someone might be doing so intentionally to knock you down in the serps.

mayest

8:09 pm on Feb 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks rocknbil. These pages have links to lots of sites that aren't very similar. They might be trying to knock me down the serps, but they aren't successful. My suspicion is that these are malicious sites that are trying to get search traffic by posting keyword heavy links pages.

nomis5

9:19 pm on Feb 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

Mayest,

Maybe they haven't been successful so far (if knocking a site down is the intention) but concern is that they could eventually be successful.

For example if I have 100 inbound good links and these site link to me 1000 times then I believe that will have an effect as far as Google is concerned.

With the pages that are linking to me, they all include only subject related sites even if the top level url has nothing to do with my site's subject.

There has to be some logic behind these links, after all it's costing someone to host that sites that are linking.

mic089

7:49 am on Feb 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've been getting daily Google alerts like those nomis5 describes. Each alert includes about 5 different pages (with addresses all in the same general format: example.com/#*$!x/#*$!.php?example-page-title) that mention the URL of one of my pages.

When I visit the sites, there is a very short garbled snippet from my site and the URL of my site's page that the snippet has been taken from (but not a clickable link to my site). At the bottom of the page there are links to other pages on the same site.

JS_Harris

4:32 am on Mar 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

Could they damage my site because there are so many of them and of no real value?

No. That site will not remain in the good graces of search engines for long so "no real value" will become "no value at all" rather quickly. Your site can't be damaged (in theory) by the activities occurring on other sites. Keep writing the great articles that make spammers want to use your stuff!