Identifying weird backlinks

[shaunm]

Hello All,

I'm seeing some weird backlinks reported in Majestic for my site. I'm not really sure how they are even identified as backlinks. These links are from authoritative sites that's what make me wonder. The are not actual URLs, not even query strings (I believe query string should have a para and value). For example, example.com/something/?abc.com.

Not really sure it's common for all sites/server to respond normal when a request is added with a ? and anything after it. Like this one [webmasterworld.com...]

But how do they show up in the backlinks report while there's no such pages as that on the site even if it's returning a 200 serer response?


Thanks!

[lucy24]

not even query strings (I believe query string should have a para and value). For example, example.com/something/?abc.com

It's wonky-looking, but that is a legitimate URL. The parameter is "abc.com"and it doesn't happen to have an assigned value, or even the expectation of one. You're most likely to see it in any site that involves looking up other domains; if the page only performs one function, it's pretty much equivalent to ?site=abc.com

Does the spurious referer lead to requests for spurious URLs on your site? If no, I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep over it.

[shaunm]

Thanks lucy24. Long time :-)

You're most likely to see it in any site that involves looking up other domains

I agree some of them are from domain look up sites while some are not.

Q 1. How exactly the bots were able to crawl such query-string URLs unless they were made available on the site?
Q 2. They are legitimate sites until the main TLD but the query-string part has para that is some gambling, adult or completely irrelevant sites in there. Is that a problem? Does that indicate negative backlinking?

[JS_Harris]

Block Majestic, Moz, Semrush, cache et all and sleep even better knowing your site metrics aren't being sold to your competitor :)

I'm not bashing the services, they make great diagnostic tools, but unfortunately they allow competitor research as well. What they gather by watching Google you can't do much about but the stuff they gather by visiting, shooo!