Strange backlinks and PR wierdness

Site showing many backlinks that aren't real

[PhilDC]

Has anyone noticed this odd problem?
When I do a link:http://www.mydomain.com, I am seeing 112 backlinks of which most are wrong and have no link to me at all or which never did.
To add to this, I put up a brand new site which instantly became PR7, showing 209 backlinks, none of which link to me at all!

[Brett_Tabke]

Was it an expired domain name?

[conor]

ya, check the wayback machine - sounds like the only plausable reason

[vincevincevince]

I have the same thing:

If I search for my domain name in Google - I see links to ANOTHER SITE in the 'links to' and 'related' links.

I also have got the PR6 from that site. My domain has not been previously registered, but has been added recently to the index.

[sticky me for further info if required]

[steveb]

Look at the page cache and see if it shows a different page.

[vincevincevince]

Yes, the cache shows a totally different page (the other domain). This is when searching for my domain name in google and following the cache link, or when right-clicking and selecting view page cache.

[steveb]

Well that's the problem, and it seems to be happening fairly often now, as if Google wasn't bumblefiddling up enough stuff already.

[nzmatt]

Google - bumblefiddling? Never! lol :o)

[PhilDC]

Well interestingly, the Google cache shows the same under construction page that has been there since 2001. I wonder if it will remain PR7

[vincevincevince]

steveb - you've seen this much? any idea what causes it or what can be done about it? I tried phoning Google but couldn't get anyone live and gave up.

[steveb]

Messages on other forums mostly. Sorry, but I haven't been paying much attention to it.

[nuevojefe]

If you have another pages cache most likely google thinks you're a mirror for that site. (Not sure, but does that also happen if you're being 302'd?)

[vincevincevince]

That's very interesting. How would one discover if one is being 302ed? My domain is small, doesn't rank well for much, and is very new. I'd not 302 me if I were into that...

[buckworks]

Someone showed me an example of this in a chat a couple of hours ago. There's nothing on the site except the default index page, but it's showing PR7 and over a hundred backlinks in Google.

Bumblefiddling ... a new word for me .... I love it! :-)

[rocco]

i have seen this with some of my sites a couple of times. the most recent case is a domain that is not used for 2 years and still shows the default index page of my hosting provider. the page has a pr6 now and no one links to it nor do i link/redirect anywhere. the backlinks are totally unrelated and unreal and are coming from one big site (according to google of course). i had this before with some of my active sites where it is a problem as the backlinks look extremly spammy and some of those domains were banned later.

[vincevincevince]

rocco - did it last?

[rocco]

no on one site it was gone after a while, for the other ones i only noticed a few days again on several domains.

[Robert Charlton]

Perhaps somewhat parallel (in the sense that's there's a database glitch, if that's what this is)...

I've noticed that Google's serps are occasionally mixing up page elements. I've seen them display titles/urls from one page with content for another, even without 302s or redirects.

Saw it most recently a few months back. On one of a client's core phrases, we have a solid ranking for pages A and B, with additional results available for pages C and D etc. At some point, Google continued to show the snippet and cache for page B, but showed the title and url for page C.

I figured it was a GoogleGlitch, and it was... It persisted for about 8 weeks, and then reverted back to normal. In this case, I didn't worry much, because the pages were both on our site.

[conor]

probably another site was 301 rdirected to that domain.

[layer8]

I have seen a similar thing, I think some sites must be using automated scripts to build link pages based on certain keywords.

They link to you google crawls, they update constantly - by the time you check your site is long gone.

This may or may not be conntected with u, but it got me a little concerned.