SEO links question - Is someone trying to fuck up my rankings?
 

I know that google penalizes you for links from unrelated sites right? So that you can't use 100 porn sites to boost the link popularity of your mortgage site, etc.

So I'm checking stats today on one of my blogs...the one that does the best in the SERPS, and I see these sites in the stats for "links from an external webpage"
- http://cheapgoodhealthinsurance.com 50 50
- http://diet-tips.bestdietfruit.com 49 49
- http://wells-fargo-home-mortgage.mor...anmortgage.com 49 49
- http://life-insurance-policies.lifei...primequote.com 46 46
- http://parlay.bookcheapsports.com 46 46
- http://small-business-loan.faxlessinstantloan.com 42 42
- http://auto-loan-calculator.instantloanquick.com

I don't own or control any of those urls. When I visit those urls I get a blank page or I get redirected somewhere else...but they're apparently linking to an adult site (according to my awstats)

Is this someone fucking with me so I lose my ranking in the SERPS and they move up?


If it is, what can I do about it?

first of all you cant get penalized for someone else linking to you. they just dont count as anything.

What you are seeing is someone faking the referring url in order to get on your stats page if it is viewable by the public. they do this in the hopes you have a "last 50 referring pages" script of some sort running.

Ok thanks for the info.

But if that's what someone was trying to do, why would the urls go to blank pages?

Also, didn't I read about google penalizing link farms where people were using their credit card site to link into their diet pill site to link to their penis enlargement site etc?

I would check with your host and make sure that your IP does not have entries with other domains as well.

I did a reverse lookup on the IP and my sites are the only ones using that IP address.


If that's what you meant....

generally its cloaking, there are several different methods.

they are looking for google rank so if the visitor ( you ) comes from google you would gt redirected, if the referrer is googlebot they would display diff content etc

if you go here
http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

enter one of the urls above and you will see the real content

I've seen that too where some of my mainstream sites urls are mixed in with a bunch of spam all over the place on the net

don't know why they do that

and that is a reason why google can't penalize you for it, because you have no control of incoming links..... at the most those links just won't have any effect at all on your domain

i explained above why. because you may have a publicly viewable stats page , usually it links the top referring pages , these count as backlinks. they also do it incase you have a script that displays the "last 50 referring urls" on your page/blog etc. This technique is just "hit lots of sites , hope someone gives you a backlink for it "

You sure it's not just some site referrer spamming?

k, thanks for the explanation, I don't have a referrers script like that on any of the sites, but I guess like you said it is a numbers game for the spammers

think of it this way , you just gave the guy 8 free backlinks, all he had to do was press start on his bot :)

even if only for that reason , if he hits 1000 blogs and 1/100 guys is curious and makes a blog post about it , he gets 10 posts with 8 backlinks = 80 backlinks. you can hit 1000 blogs in a few secs with a bot :)

Lenny stop posting all my domains here.j/k :)

Hey I only post what tony404 tells me to post.

He is the puppet master, I am the one tied to the strings.

So then does google penalize the site with the irrelevant outbound links then? For selling links or link farming or whatever?

I "know" that I read about a penalty somewhere when they first implemented this.

good question

supposedly linking to bad neighborhoods is supposed to hurt you in google's eyes, but I've seen some high ranking respectable sites that have spam problems and don't moderate well and they are still ranking high, so it makes you wonder :2 cents: