Back links that don't exist showing up

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Back links that don't exist showing up

And PR aswell

surfgatinho

10:07 pm on Oct 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

I just went to a domain I don't use anymore (haven't for about 3 months) there was no page there but it had a PR of 4.
As this seemed a little strange I checked in the back links on the toolbar. What I found was 161 backlinks from other sites I run.
There are no links from these pages nor have there ever been

One reason I'm so sure there aren't any links I've forgotten about is I didn't start these sites until after I wound down the other site.

It's wierd, they are on different servers.

All the Web agrees with me - zero links

surfgatinho

10:15 am on Oct 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

Any ideas how this could happen?
Could it's by association ie a links to b and b links to c. I think the links WERE maybe a - b - c - d if at all. Or site a links to b and d?
Or cold it be from a Whois lookup?

kaled

10:27 am on Oct 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, I was checking to see if Google had fixed their backlink algo yesterday and found links being reported that don't show in the cache. I think there were links on one page months ago (it's a WHAT'S NEW page on someone else's site) but I'm not so sure about a couple of other pages.

Google's link: command is totally busted.

As for PR, according to Yahoo backlinks, I have a PR5 page with ~170 backlinks and a PR6 page with ~60 backlinks. I haven't checked every link, but I would say the PR of the pages linking to my PR 5 page are higher (on average) - not at all scientific but it makes me wonder about the accuracy of the PR algo.

Kaled.

ThomasB

10:33 am on Oct 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

Surfgathino, did you have sth like a "Website under Construction" page on your site that you use on other domains as well? It could be that G sees the dupes as one site and handles them the same way ie showing the backlinks of the highest one.

surfgatinho

11:16 am on Oct 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

ThomasB, you could have somehting there - Although it's not the linking by association/whois conspiracy I was hoping for!

If this is the case then it reflects how out of date and broken the backlink button is. The under construction pages haven't been up for over 2 months on any of the sites.