Backlinks from Sites w/ Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

Keep getting backlinks from many sites where Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

[SuperT]

Hi, my site has many backlinks from sites that never render. They always show Bandwidth Limit Exceeded. The last couple of sites, I was able to use bing cache to see what the site looked like. But something seems suspicious to me about these sites that never render yet the search engines are somehow picking up the backlinks.

Anyone run into this? Should I disavow these links? How can I handle them?

They are typically irrelevant to my business.

[not2easy]

For a moment I thought a different thread had been renamed. See this discussion: [webmasterworld.com...] and about 5 or 6 posts down you'll see another webmaster is seeing the same problem.

[SuperT]

Thank you! I will post over there.

[not2easy]

Both of you may be seeing something similar, but your experience, your situation and its causes may be quite different. My mention of it was in case you might pick up some ideas or insight from the discussion there. If not, you've got this one.

[tangor]

They are typically irrelevant to my business.

The more important question is are they harming your business?

Most search engines know the difference between normal/logical linking and BS/Camouflage links. Most times you just ignore these. If you are anal retentive as regards your link profile then nuke these in disavow... but you'll spend a considerable amount of personal time getting that done.

The "bandwidth exceeded" is a clear indication these were junk sites to begin with, usually on small shared hosting servers for low dollars, intended only to spam/scam the web.

Do yourself a favor, just nuke the HOST and don't worry about the rest.

[fathom]

Ignore them!

All websites (including yours) have lots of stuff completely irrelevant to them... A natural link profile generally has nothing but irrelevant link anchors to it topics, beyond brand identity. Additionally, most websites have self-created linkspam. The more you weed your link garden the more exposed your self-developed unnatural links are making it that much easier for PENGUIN TO DEVALUE YOU.

[SuperT]

The reason I'm digging deeper into these is because we got hit with an algo towards the latter part of 2014. I suspected panda which I still believe is the case but haven't seen much traction in my fixes even though I know panda is still rolling out. In fact, things have been fluctuating quite a bit lately so I was wondering if maybe we actually got hit by penguin and I should be focusing more of my efforts towards fixing our backlink profile.

I started to notice a lot more of these websites linking to quite a bit with irrelevant anchor text and their site has nothing to do with us. We are an ecommerce site selling therapy products like knee braces, back supports, etc. But then we have a paleo site or an apartment rental site linking to us. Then we might have others who may seem more relevant because they are medical related like about auto-immune diseases and gallbladders but yet they're just linking with really random anchor text and the text surrounding those portions have poor grammar and are irrelevant. For example, this gallbladder site will link to our shoulder braces, yet the text right before it will talk about music or olive oil?

The links from the gallbladder site are no-follow, so that should mean I can just ignore them, correct?

For all of these links, I can't even access the page directly, they all come up with that bandwidth exceeded error. How is google accessing them or even bing (since bing has them cached)?

@fathom - are you saying that by leaving them, there will be a higher mixture of irrelevant links so it looks more natural? Whereas, if they start getting cleaned up, there will be worse ones showing up which makes it easier to be hit by penguin?

@tangor - I'm not sure at this point - just wondering if maybe the issue our site is dealing with is penguin rather than panda and trying to figure out the best way to approach this.

[fathom]

"Click Here"... Is as irrelevant as it comes... All link anchors that do not target your keywords are NATURAL LINKS.. The why "in why they are there" is immaterial. The link anchor is only one part.

Passing PageRank is another. A domain or page that has no PageRank is of no ranking help to you, especially if it also doesn't have any relatedness to you e.g. The Link Anchor. If it can't help to rank how can it possible harm you?

In reverse, links that PASS PageRank, which also have PageRank to pass and that are highly targeted to your keywords are what gets you devalued although Google isn't 100% granular so all the crap you find in your profile is camouflage for any unnatural links you have.

You should only disavow that which you personally created, or at least directed how it should be create and only when you have no direct ability to do link reclamation on. Link Reclamation is getting the rel="nofollow" in the link element making such links natural in Google's eyes.

If links already have rel="nofollow" in the link element they are PERFECT!

[cm_is]

We are also seeing a lot of these types of links in the search console lately, and we are not very happy with that.

For all of these links, I can't even access the page directly, they all come up with that bandwidth exceeded error. How is google accessing them or even bing (since bing has them cached)?

Actually you can access those sites. They are not really throwing a 509 Error but have a 200 Http status code. The only thing you have to do is change the user-agent of your browser to "Googlebot" and your able to access those kind of sites.

For all those backlinks we see in the search console, all of the sites use the same html/css combination, as well as the same blueprint in generell.

[martinibuster]

"Click Here"... Is as irrelevant as it comes

Well... as I understand it...
"Click Here" is understood by the search engines to be navigational in nature. "Buy Viagra" is understood to be an informational anchor text, albeit irrelevant.

If I were a search engine...
If I were a search engine dealing with a "click here text" I would either pull relevance queues from surrounding text, context from a block of text nearby the "click here" anchor, from a topic classification of the page, or failing that, simply count it as a vote and treat "click here" as a null anchor text. Except in the case of a link originating from an off topic page.

The "irrelevant anchor" (like "buy Viagra") would likely be discounted by other analysis. Since that kind of thing is fairly widespread, continuing on the "If I were a search engine" speculation, I would not rely on the anchor text signal alone as an indicator of spam but rather combine it with others to come to a common sense judgment that there's a mismatch in intent between the anchor text and the landing page and thus discount it.

We know Google's been able to discern topic since around 2003/2004 and to depreciate the link on account of that. And we know Google reads surrounding text to give meaning to an anchor. And we know the search engines are able to break the web graph down even more granular pieces than just individual web pages, to break the web graph down to different parts of the web page and create a web graph on that level. So the above hypothesis isn't particularly incredible or far-fetched.

Oh yeah mb? Well that's just your opinion and you're not a search engine! Bless your god-damn heart!

[fathom]

We tend to agree but just to make sure:

All other factors considered... If I never asked for the link, never paid, never traded, never bartered or gave something in lieu of cash for the link. never had any input on the link, was never giving the ability to determine if I wanted the link... I can completely ignore the link even if the anchor reads BUY VIAGRA >>>>>> UNLESS MY WEBSITE IS ACTUALLY ABOUT BEDTIME WOODIES!

[martinibuster]

I agree! :)