Forum Moderators: open
I was doing a backlink check on one domain when I came across backlinks from a different domain where there was no backlink at all in the code (page etc).
The only place in the whole page that the other domain was mentioned was anemail@thedomain.com
Now surely an email address cannot be regarded as a backlink or can it?
If not then why do you think that it came up as a backlink?
FYI - I searched on google for the domain and then clicked on the pages that link to these site button.
it's listed as a backlink to your domain or to a more specific url? did you checked the source-code of that page in googles cache?
Ok what I did was search for www.domain.com and then you get that page in google that gives you choices such as contain the term, link to etc.
The link to is what I am talking about.
So I do this search for domain1 and find that domain 2 is listed as a backlink, but only because it has in the form an email address pointing to anemail@domain1.com
Does this make it clearer?
You need to do a 'View Source' on the page so you can see the source code of the site with the email address, then do a 'Find' for 'nameofsite.com' to see if the domain name comes up anywhere else in the source code.
Does this make it clearer?
yes - a bit. visit_thailand, have you checked the source of the google cache on that site? i haven't run a test on a email only google link so far, but i can hardly imagine, that this would be count as a backlink. it's a pitty that google offers no search on backlinking pages only. if there would be something like this, it could be easyly checked-out by searching for a specific page containing a yahoo.com email adress. if this page is backlinking to yahoo, then this would be proven.
so if you can't find anything in the archived page which looks like a link to your page, then google treats email adresses as backlinks.
but: i know about one indexed page with an email which could have been a backlink to another site but it isn't. so email isn't taken automatically as backlink.
Yes i did check the source of the page, that is how I know that there is no link hidden or otherwise, only the email address.
It is not just on one page either it is on lots of pages.
I am very concerned about this as it could be mis-construed as crosslinking which is not what it is meant to be.
I will take a look at google's cache of the page as well.
What I am very concerned about is crosslinking?
Do you think that Google would think this is crosslinking, the email address is part of a form so it is not even a link never mind visible.
Do you think that Google would think this is crosslinking, the email address is part of a form so it is not even a link never mind visible.
it's really a very special case of yours thailand. i tried to rebuild the thing, but it won't work on standard email links. maybe you can sticky mail me the url and i can take a closer look.
I run forums as well. And have put word filters in place to deny anything.com, something.net, etc. You can put anything .com though, as this is not counted due to the space before the .com
I can tell you for sure that e-mail addresses are not counted as back links
maybe this is because of the input field value, which is scanned by google if i remember correctly. google tries to match a url in these values and maybe it does not realize that it is an email?
I guess I had better spend yet more time guarding against Spammers then. Oh well, perhaps Google will cut me into their profits for doing their job for them ;-)
I am very concerned about it though as I do not want to be penalised nor do I want the other site to appear as backlinks to this site.
We only put the additional email in as a security measure in case something was wrong with one server's email we would still get the order through another email address which is on a different server.
I am concerned that Google might regard it as duplicate content of some kind, a hidden link (if it thinks it is a link and this one is not visible as it is part of a form then perhaps it thinks it is hidden) etc. etc.
i won't run into trouble because of this. it seems to be a fault of google indexing - not yours. don't panic. if you feel unconfident about it, try to contact google about and say you want to have this backlink reference removed - because it is none and you don't want to be connected with that site in _any_ way.
i just made my point on what i'm thinking whats going on in that specific case so i don't hunt on that piece of sourcecode ;).
good luck and don't panic ;)
Small problem is that there are hundreds of these pages! So it is not just one page, plus the page is similar (but not identical) to another page on the site it is linked to.
I shall see what happens in the next couple of updates!
i think it's a bug and they have to fix it. line out your position clearly and maybe googleguy can show-up it here and add some spice into this thread.
One or two weeks ago, I saw in another thread something about using @ in an url like
www.username@domain.com
I cannot find the thread at this momemt (the original URL was removed by the moderator), but it turned out it is possible to put an <username> or <username>:<password> in an URL.
You can try for yourself with your own site
[<somename>@yourdomain.com...]
and see the same page as
[yourdomain.com...]
I hope information will help you to solve your problem.
what you mean are so called @ domains which are supported by browsers/client capable of javascript only. they are completely non-standard so i really would wonder if google ever tries to index such kind of rubbish links.
That is incorrect; such syntax is very much standard. Check out RFC 2068: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 [faqs.org] for instance:
URL schemes that involve the direct use of an IP-based protocol to a specified server on the Internet use a common syntax for the server component of the URI's scheme-specific data:<userinfo>@<host>:<port>
where <userinfo> may consist of a user name and, optionally, scheme-specific information about how to gain authorization to access the server. The parts "<userinfo>@" and ":<port>" may be omitted.
server = [ [ userinfo "@" ] hostport ]
The user information, if present, is followed by a commercial at-sign "@".
userinfo = *( unreserved ¦ escaped ¦ ";" ¦ ":" ¦ "&" ¦ "=" ¦ "+" ¦ "$" ¦ "," )
Some URL schemes use the format "user:password" in the userinfo field. This practice is NOT RECOMMENDED, because the passing of authentication information in clear text (such as URI) has proven to be a security risk in almost every case where it has been used.
Or, in layman's terms, [user:password@example.com...] is perfectly valid syntax and is unrelated to JavaScript.
I just found the thread [webmasterworld.com] I was referring to.
