A flood of weird backlinks in Google WMT

[jake66]

In webmaster tools (from google) I've been noticing an alarming amount of incoming links generating 404's.

These appear to be scraper sites. They are linking to my site (and other similar sites) like so:

URL of offending page:
http://www.example.com/forum/attachments/index.php?q=some+widget+product

URL of page on my site they linked to:
http://www.example.com/prod/Some_Widget.html&fr=PJqG2s&gl=us&hl=en&sa=title
(the part I bolded is the only correct portion)
... when I go to this URL, I get a 404.

URL of my competitor's site they linked to:
http://example.com/directory/widget/13&fr=AO1LQjN7&gl=us&hl=en&sa=title

To me, it looks as though they are attempting to feed google duplicate content.
Luckily, I've noticed this happening a few weeks ago and began tightening my 404 rules.

Now, when I go to:
http://www.example.com/forum/attachments/index.php?q=some+widget+product

and change the search query to:
http://www.example.com/forum/attachments/index.php?q=something+else ... I get a whole new set of results!

This is occuring from a VARIETY of sources. It's starting to look as though this is a hack job because nearly every page (regardless of the url) is similar. A lot of them have a copyright with some russian crap at the bottom... but the latest one I seen today doesn't have that.

My question is: Can this have any negative impact in my rankings and why on earth would somebody hack a site just to add this type of fluff?

I did report a few sites to google, but there's so many I just gave up.

Ok, I looked at the source of one of these pages and noticed some ADSENSE code.
I suppose I see the reason for this now, is there any way to stop this stuff from linking to me?

Is this happening to anyone else?

[tedster]

I've seen this kind of junk, too. Yes, it is probably some kind of attempt to hack things and build spma for Google. But it's probably automated across many sites that fit some kind of criteria with little concern for whether it actually works in any single case.

Can it have a negative effect on you rankings? Not if your server replies with a 404 to an incorrect query string. Don't worry about the report in WMT - it's just there for your information. You cannot control what links other sites publish, but making the incorrect ones 404, you should be protected.

[g1smd]

Those parameters

&fr=PJqG2s&gl=us&hl=en&sa=title

are in some way associated with something at Google.

Might have worked too, if the first & had been a ? instead.

I 301 redirect URL requests with '&' but not '?' to change the very first '&' to a '?' - and then 301 redirect again to strip parameters from the URL.

[jake66]

g1smd, if those are Google parameters.. does that mean these scrapers are pulling data from the search engine results?

That is one of the most bizarre things I've heard recently.

As far as I can tell, none of these are ranking in the results and appear to be in hidden directories that the website owners likely don't know about - so how useful are the ads really going to be?

What possible use could these types of sites pose?

[tedster]

It's very possible that they are trying something out to see if it works, not that they already KNOW it will work. With automated spam techniques, that kind of exploration can be quite common. They thionk they see some loophole or other at Google, and they hammeer away to see if there is a chink in the armor or not.