Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In the list of external pages linking to my site (main and internal pages), there are hundreds of urls that when I click on them from the tools page, I get a site that has no mention of my site on it anywhere (so clearly it's not a valid inbound link). Are these sites somehow hijacking or spamming me or scraping? I don't even know what the right terms are here...sorry.
Why are these pages showing up as pages linking to me according to Webmaster tools if they have no link to me at all?
Thanks!
1. The report is wrong (bugs do show up in GWT more often than I am comfortable with)
2. The link is there but "cloaked" so they only show it to googlebot and not to regular browsers
You can easily check for basic "user agent" cloaking by using Firefox and installing the User Agent Switcher extension, so your browser says it is googlebot when it asks for the page in the report. If they are taking the lazy way to cloak - and many do - the page you get this way would show your link.
"Scraping" would mean they took your content and are publishing it on their website. If this causes them to rank where your page normally would, then they have "hijacked" your position in Google. "Spam" or "webspam" is a more general word that means using any kind of trick to rank higher than a page would on its own. Cloaking, scraping, and hijacking are all tools that some people use to spam Google.
