Inbound link spam.

10's of thousands of inbound links from a few domains.

[Broadway]

Webmaster tools reports that I have a couple hundred thousand inbound links coming from maybe 10 different domains. Each domain links to just one of my internal pages.

It's the kind of thing where someone has set up a page template. My URL is in the footer. They have churned out thousands of spam pages using this template.

I'd love for this linking to go away but but that seems unlikely.

More importantly, I was assuming that Google realizes that I'm a victim here and just ignores the links and doesn't penalize me for them.

Anybody else have this type of problem? And is the situation a non-issue with Google?

[Planet13]

I believe what you are referring too is known as google bowling and there are varying opinions on how effective it can be at reducing the rankings of the target site.

My completely uninformed, wild guess is that some competitor(s) see that a site has lots of good inbound links and is outranking them, so the competitors then set up thousands (or tens of thousands) of spammy links in the hopes that google will devalue ALL of your inbound links (including the good ones).

Matt Cutts has said not to worry about that and that it is difficult for a competitor to hurt another site. Please note that he did NOT say it is IMPOSSIBLE for a competitor to hurt another site.

[Robert Charlton]

More importantly, I was assuming that Google realizes that I'm a victim here and just ignores the links and doesn't penalize me for them.

I'd let Google know about it, just to get this on the record.

Tens of thousands, IMO, is definitely in the area where you can get hurt. I wouldn't let it go nearly that far without sending Google a message.

[aristotle]

Do you know how long these links have been pointing to your site?

If it's been more than a few weeks, and your site's rankings still haven't been hurt, then you might be safe.