Inbound links from bad neighborhoods

[docj]

I recently became director of a large Web site and have over 15,000 inbound links on a particular page. I've been using google's Webmaster Tools to figure out where these inbound links are coming from and discovered some (a few hundred?) are coming from adult Web sites.

I pulled up the source code for one of the incoming pages and see that they have a frameset with one frame containing their content (sized to 100%) and 4 other frames sourced to what looks like random legitimate Web sites.

1. Might we be penalized for unrelated inbound traffic from a bad neighborhood?

2. Are there any defensive steps I can take to get out of this?

[soxos]

Are all the links from just one website / IP? If so you will probably escape a penalty. If they are from multiple sites across a range of IP's then you might not and would depend on the strength / trust of your other inbound links.

Click here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[docj]

They are using cloaking so there are many different domain names, but it is the same site. I haven't looked into the IP addresses, but I am going to assume they have different IPs as well.

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

Do you think that these are planted on behalf of an otherwise reasonably ethical competitor? I suspect that they are but they only get the black mark put on you because they think that there is no way to get caught.

It would be really good for the authorities to build a case against one company or individual and prosecute them. Then at least they might think twice in future.

Cheers

Sid

[docj]

Hissingsid: I don't think it's a competitor. It's an adult web site operator populating one visible frameset with their content and 4 invisible frames with random content from the Web. The code was really simple like this:

frameset
frame src = adult site -- the only one frame that will be visible
frame src = example.com -- invisible
frame src = consumer health topic -- invisible
frame src = game console -- invisible
frame src = some other random topic -- invisible
frameset

The only thing I can think of is they are trying to make their site look legit to Google so it doesn't get trapped in the adult content filter?

[tedster]

Is Google reporting the frame src URLs as backlinks?

[docj]

Yes, it looks like Google is reporting the frame src URLs as backlinks, although I cannot positively confirm this as I haven't been able to find my URL. The frameset is essentailly the only code on the page that Google says is linking to me.