Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
When I was looking in my webmaster tools, under the links section, I'm seeing a few links from what looks like some foreign country. But location of the link is terrible. Some subdomain of a site, and the subdomain is a cruddy string of letters that don't even make sense, and really long. I know the site is suppose to be in a different language, the letters don't look like they might spell words. Something like this....
klakytbksghjgheiiosklslekklkfnykllynggleeasdk._____.com/____/48978/_____.html
I looked at the page and can't quite make heads or tails of it. Sort of looks like a foreign directory, with category links. I clicked some other categories and I see a couple of my competitors as well.
Someone mentioned proxy hijacking. But isn't that when you're whole home page is stolen, with all kinds of links to it? This just looks like something else.
Thoughts?
Even if you can't understand the text on that page, you should still be able to make sense of the HTML, and see if there's a direct link to you or if something else is going on. Sometimes spam networks do link out to legitimate websites.
These links may not be the source of your ranking problem -- but it sounds like something you'd want to be sure of. Do you have a decent backlink profile otherwise? If you do, I'm not sure how a few links, even from a "bad neighborhood", would hurt you.
Please note the use of the weasel* word could. No weasels were harmed in the production of this post, however many electrons got kicked around.
[edited by: tedster at 4:34 am (utc) on June 30, 2007]
