Sites linking to me

Can anyone tell me what these are?

[jackofalltrades]

Hi all

From another post, I used +www.mydomain.com to see whos linking to me and i came up with a couple of strange ones. Not being too technical, i was hoping that one of you fine people can shed some light on these.

1. www.domain1.com/widgets.asp

According to the result text on this one, this page is linking to a page within my site. No problem there.

On click, it redirects to www.domain2.com and theres no sign of my link. I checked both domains (offer similar services, basically the same really) and no sign of a link to my site (or the page its meant to be on).

Interestingly, the parent company (www.domain3.com) seems to be a "widget recruiter", boasting clients such as dell and lycos, whereas 1 and 2 are both "widget providers".

My question is why is this happening? Why is Google telling me that one site links to mine, when there is a redirect in place and no sign of my link?

I guess this must be intentional (i dont reckon this can happen by accident) - if so, what possible benefit could it have?

Case 2:

(simpler I assure you)

[randomdomain.com...]

In this case, my whole site appears within a kinda frame, i guess. Like if u click a link in a Hotmail message, you get the Hotmail bar at the top.

It has a bar at the top with:

LOCATION VIA PROXY: www.mysite.com

It also has a basic control panel type deal (delete cookies, no ads, no scripts, etc ... all check boxes).

I assume this is a site you can "browse" thru and kill any nasty stuff, but i just wanted to check as ive never seen it before.

Cheers all! :)

JOAT

[Liane]

JOAT,

It sounds as though they are using hidden links. Check their source code.

[jackofalltrades]

I cant open the source for the page - redirects to site 2.

What benefit could they gain from hidden links?

cheers
JOAT

<added> bit of deeping checking and domain 1 and domain 2 are part of domain 3.

Domain 3 is half of an ecom company (domain 4) that split into two - domain 3 and domain 5 .... a SEO company </added>

[rogerd]

JOAT, it is probably some kind of redirecting spam, maybe cloaked, maybe not. I've seen sites use keyword search results, for example, to create a page which robots will see but users won't. Your link may appear in the results, and show up as a link to your site when the page gets indexed. There are a variety of ways to try to get a look at the code - maybe the simplest is to start by checking Google's cache.

[jackofalltrades]

Thanks ill have a look at it. :)

What sort of impact will this have on our sites?

I assume it will have none on mine, but can it be of benefit to theirs?

Cheers
JOAT

[rogerd]

They created the page hoping that it would show up in search results, i.e., as a doorway page.

It probably won't hurt you, unless, of course, it is promoting a competitor. Also, you want to be sure it isn't showing up high in the search results for your company name or domain name.

I've had some success at getting this kind of junk removed from Google by doing a spam report.

[jimbeetle]

JOAT,

I also include a bit of javascript in the body tag of all of my pages to prevent them from being framed:

onload="if (self!= top) top.location = self.location"

Jim

[jackofalltrades]

It is my brand name, but that is keywordkeyword, so no recourse in that respect (im having some fun with another site on that topic...theres another thread about that one!).

However the sites that supposedly link to me are unrelated to the keywords.

I think ill send a note to their parent company.

Or just report them.

Ill see what kind of mood im in in the morning! ;)

Cheers all

JOAT

[martinibuster]

Hi joat,
Did you trying checking Google's cache, to see what G was seeing?

Also a possibility that the page has already changed from what it was before.

Or, yeah, it could be someone trying to hijack your keyword/name in the serps.

[Allergic]

JOAT to see the code of a redirect page just type in your address box:
view-source:http://www.widget.com

[jackofalltrades]

Wow!

Googles cache shows a link to just about every "widget" page there is! Seriously at least 100 pages linked to here.

Another thing i noticed on one of the parent sites was that their resources section was the top 30 results on Google for 15 different phrases. Yes, 450 links, descriptions and all!

The view source command shows the code for the page you get redirected to. Any way of seeing the source for the original page?

The links from the cached version just take me to the redirected page.

Cheers
JOAT :)

[rogerd]

I haven't tried this, JOAT, but maybe if you did view source on the long URL in the Google cache page...

[jackofalltrades]

That does bring up the code for the cached version, but i cant see a redirect - only mention of the URL is a link to it from the cached page.

JOAT