Anyone else seeing huge influx of inbound links in WMT?

[MikeNoLastName]

Just wandered by my inbound links page on G WMT and did a double-take as there was an extra 285,000 inbound links on one of my internal pages. Usually there are about 10K. Looked more closely and they all came from one PR5 website which is sorta relevant, but which is shown as linking under totally irrelevant keywords. However we do not appear anywhere in the code of the pages referenced. Worse still GWMT lists them as:

http://example.com/example.php?Id_Category=17&Name=widget
Via this intermediate link:
http://example.com/example.php?Id_Online=116733

When you click on the latter "intermediate link" it takes you, somehow, to a totally non-applicable page on a VERY well known mass internet marketer starting with the letter "A" and we don't appear anywhere there either!

Furthermore the new keywords we are being "linked" under as reported in the top 50 for our site by WMT are highly relevant to the example.com site, but not really relevant to us, thus likely throwing off our SEO on G BIG TIME.

Sounds like a total G WMT melt down. Hope it does not affect our rankings, AGAIN!

Any other similar reports?

[aristotle]

These might be transient auto-generated spam links that were deleted shortly after googlebot crawled the pages.

[MikeNoLastName]

Aristotle: I think you're mostly right. After doing much more investigation, I think it may have been an unintentional screw up by example.com. Their site is obviously code generated, but it is as far as I can tell, legit and does a lot of selling through A--. They also normally have a couple links to us on one page. I think what happened is they were experimenting with a new website building algo and/or mass 301 redirects and instead of linking to A-- linked them ALL to us and possibly others (what are the odds?). They managed to get 280K crawled in an awful short time before realizing the error.

An e-mail to example.com through their only form of contact (an onsite form) resulted in an error, so I'm not sure I got through. Domain Reg is private.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed and waiting for the message from G about bogus backlinks, with my finger on the disavow link.

[aristotle]

Your theory that these links were created accidentally could be right, of course, but I wouldn't bet on it. Millions of auto-generated links are created everyday, and many of them disappear shortly afterward to make room for new ones. I believe that it's a scheme that spammers use to try to get a brief rankings gain and short burst of traffic by associating their pages with reputable pages on the same topic. Also, they may get some traffic from webmasters who see the referring page in their logs or analytics or WMT, and click out of curiosity to see the pages that contain the backlinks.