Old 302 hijack in a new bottle?

[McMohan]

Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. A site, sitting pretty with decent ranks for its target terms. Around Penguin 2.0, loses its ranks. Keyword anchors less than 10% of overall links and dominated by brand name anchors from good neighborhood. Keywords not very competitive.

Now to 302 can of worms. Digging deeper into the backlinks, discovered over 1000 pages 302 redirect to this site from over 500 unique domains. These sites belong to a network. A redirecting URL looks like http:// domainname.com/out.asp?id=8386. These redirects were first noticed between 1 to 2 months before Penguin 2.0. What is the deal here?

[edited by: goodroi at 4:53 pm (utc) on May 29, 2013]
[edit reason] Delinked example [/edit]

[jakebohall]

Could it be an affiliate?

[McMohan]

Could it be an affiliate?

No, there is no affiliate program connected with this website.

[indyank]

Since Google is said to treat 302s as 301s these days, they might have been created to harm your site and they probably succeeded. Affiliate links should carry a nofollow even if they are 302 redirected.If not, I only see a malicious intent, especially since it is from so many domains.

Do you see these domain's in google's index? If yes, these links probably count.

Most of these domains will have some silly names and are primarily created for blackhat purposes. why can't Google find a way to ignore links from these domains and keep them away from their index? They should be able to identify such domains with several other signals, if not names.

[McMohan]

indyank,

Thanks for the details. The pages that carry these links are indexed and there is no nofollow. They happened over a short duration within a period of a month. The anchor they used is company name, no keyword.