All links are good, or are they?

[steveinspain]

Hello all:

I've just been looking at sites that link to my site, and whilst flattered by some who have picked me up, I'm concerned by others that I don't want to be associated with. An embarrassment of riches I suppose.

The site that concernes me most (aside from one that offers Iraqui Dinar exchange into Dollars...hmmmm....) is one in Italy that has absolutely nothing to do with my industry (they sell Programming courses in Italy, I'm a portal for high end property), and for whatever reason they have made over 150 links, as my link seems to be on each of their pages.

What is worse is that when I try to go to the site, to find out who the webmaster is to ask him/her to kindly remove the link...I find that the site is unlocatable, dead URL. Yet the links keep proliferating!

Any help?

Best,

Steve

[kitchin]

How do you know they are linking to you? Is this referer log spam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam)?

[steveinspain]

Hi Kitchin:

Oh drat, you mean there's yet another spam-related nuisance I have to contend with?

Here's what I know....

Months ago I found that for reasons unfathomable to me, the Italian sites in mention, prosoft.it and onlinecorsi.it (it seems that they are both by the same owner), had my site linked behind a one-liner on their sidebar entitled "properties to rent in Europe" on their homepage. At first I felt, "well, any link is a good link and even though I don't have property to rent, it can't hurt."

However, their stated line of business had nothing to do with me, and as my site matured, I sent a note to the site owners asking them to remove the link to my site, as I hadn't asked for it to begin with. No response.

Yesterday, I was fooling around and happened upon wholinkstome.com and found that Yahoo has 443 sites linking to mine, villas.com, half of which are generated by the aforementioned sites. Even google and MSN have some linkes generated by these, but not nearly as many.

So here I am. As I mentioned, these URL's are now dead, so there's no way to contact them.

Could this be sour grapes and childishness because I asked them (very nicely, I might add) to go away?

How do I remove them? As my understanding of the Internet from a owner's point of view has also matured, I no longer want to be associated with sites that have no possible connection with me, even if I stretch the limits of what is a relevant site to my core business.

Steve

[kitchin]

That sounds like something different, I think it's called link farming or something. It's a way to try to get Google hits. Annoying when you search on something, and get one of these fake pages with random info from all over the web. But I don't understand, why are you worried about the links if the pages are gone? What do you mean "the URL's are dead?" Is this about search results?

[steveinspain]

Hey:

Here you go, try this out. You can go to wttp://www.wholinkstome.com and enter www.villas.com and then sniff around on the "more" links from Yahoo. The first pages are meaningful links to my site, but then you'll run into page after page of links from prosoft.it and onlinecorsi.it.

Of if this is too slow for you, go straight to Yahoo and enter this in the search line: link:http://www.villas.com/ and you'll get to the same place.

If you try to go to any of the .it pages you'll either get a 404 or page not found. And if you try the URL in any browser, you'll get the same.

My whole point is that in today's climate of all the trickery some webmasters use to drive traffic their way, I don't want any part of it, or even the appearance of link farming or fooling around. I don't want to have the exposure/possibility of being penalised for something I didn't do. Nor do I want any association with bogus sites that don't exist.

I subscribe to the "if you build it, they will come" school of thought, and have gone to great lengths to provide a meaningful and rich experience on my site of the highest quality.

Having 150+ links to my site from a site (or sites) that doesn't exist concerns me, as I believe it would any responsible and rational site owner.

Best,

Steve

[kitchin]

Maybe the Yahoo index is out-of-date? Or the offenders are presenting special content to the Yahoo bot. Anyway, you could ask Yahoo to recrawl the offending site, if you can find the right form on the Yahoo site!

[Andilinks]

I often find a wide difference between reality and the search engines indexes. Look at this trendmapper chart on the instances of the term "andilinks" in the three search engines. Oddly MSN is the most accurate.

http://www.trendmapper.com/charts/pages/andilinks.html

You can begin a chart there on your own keywords. Unfortunately I have almost no success in even getting a response from the search engines about this, let alone a remedy. The SE indexes are a lot like the weather, they affect us but affecting them is very difficult.

It does sound like these Italian "sites" are spamming your referrer logs. But I see so much bizarre and inexplicable activity on my referrer logs I have my hands full just separating the real from the bogus--understanding the bogus is just a lost cause. :)

Andi