Inflated backlinks - how do they do this?

Backlinks showing up when the site is not linked to from the page

[More Traffic Please]

I have noticed a few sites in my niche that have a large number of backlinks from pages on other sites and those pages don't actually contain a link back to the page being checked. I find no hidden text and using view source>find command for the URL of the page being linked to shows nothing.

It is generally a situation where I'll check backlinks to site "A" and it will show that page 1 of site "B" links back. I check page 1 of site "B" and there is a link. The problem is that pages 2-50 are also showing up as backlinks. When I check those pages, there are no links. I thought it might be some kind of a CSS thing, but to the best of my knowledge Google does not read CSS and some of the sites don't seem to be using any form of CSS at all. What are they doing?

[WebGuerrilla]

It usually has to do with there being a lag between the last recalculation of links. For example, if you bought a text link on a site with 5000 pages, and that link ran long enough for the backlinks to get counted, you would continue to see those links show up in a backlink search until the next link update.

Google's freshbot system ads to the confusion because they will reindex a page that no longer contains a link to your site throughout the month, but those periodic refreshes don't alter the backlink counts.

So you end up with Google saying a page is linking to a particular site, even though there is no link on the current page, or Google's most recent cached copy of the page.

[cabbie]

Apart from a lag in a link update there is also cloaking,301's and just plain hijacking of sites that will show backlinks that dont appear to be there to you.

[nuevojefe]

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