A mystery: g shows backlinks, but links aren't there

I spotted a site with PR 7, but can't find the source of the ranking

[oaktown]

I ran across a site (PR 7) that has me completely stumped. The owner clearly bought a site that had been around for at least three years, and was focused on left-handed widgets. It is now focused on a completely unrelated topic. When I looked at the backlinks, they show a link from a google directory listing, but the majority are either from sites totally unrelated to the topic (focused on a foriegn country), or from a large database-driven site. In none of those listings is there a link to the site in question. He does have some actual links from sites, but it makes no sense to me.

How can Google be showing links inbound from pages where no link exists?

Any help solving this will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[GoogleGuy]

Huh. Send me a spam report with "oaktown" in the comments and I'll root around to see.

<added>One of the nice things about keeping a whole copy of the web + links around is for tracing when someone is spamming, but another nice thing is the ability to debug and track down issues long after the crawl/indexing happens.</added>

[ciml]

> How can Google be showing links inbound from pages where no link exists?

Usually, this is because two URLs have been merged in Google due to 100% duplicate content or a redirect from one to the other.

You might find that the Google cache for the URL you're looking at shows another URL, or that a page linked from those pages you mention may be listed as something else in the Google cache.

[oaktown]

Thanks in advance GG,

I sent you a report with the URL from
[google.com...]

If you need further data, please let me know

[oaktown]

Ciml,

I'm seeing many, many sites with distinct URLs and none of them has any link to this site in their code. Your suggestion is a good one, but I think the sheer number and variety of examples suggests that the answer lies elsewhere. Thanks for the idea and please let me know if anything else comes to mind.

[julinho]

I've seen this same thing happening with some sites of mine: a link which used to exist is dropped, but link:mysite.com still shows the back link.

[GoogleGuy]

Very strange. It looks almost like something weird is going on with that ISP not having virtual hosting set up correctly. I'm gonna pass this on to the crawl team--thanks for mentioning this, oaktown.