Andem - 6:43 pm on Nov 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

Until recently, I had thousands of these (non-)links from Google itself showing up in webmaster tools: example.com/widg... Strangely, they disappeared the same day I posted about it here on WebmasterWorld. [webmasterworld.com...]

On the other hand, literally tens of thousands of search engine scrapers link to pages like "example.com/red/widg" OR "example.com/red/wi..." OR "example.com/red/widgCACHED" and they are reported on webmaster tools. I personally see a correlation between the amount of these error reports and site ranking. These are all spammy links.