Backlinks from Unwanted Website

Illegal websites linking back to us

[new_seo]

Hello Forum,
Back after a longtime; I was into SEO for a longtime. After that I moved to Web Analytics Domain and in that for a long time now. Recently the company I am working for found an issue in terms of Back Links and they came to me for a solution. But the scenario is new to me as well and I think forum can help me to solve that.
Let’s come to the issue:
Support section of our company (support.example.com) is receiving a huge number of backlinks from #*$! Websites. Our company is dealing with IT Hardware.
https://department_us_govenrment.gov/Exit/MSHAexit.asp?var1=https://s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/acct/55-text-related-to-#*$!-type-content.html (this is the referring URL) and
http://support.example.com/index?page=answerlink&userlocale=nl_NL&segment=SUPPORTproductCode=&locale=nl&url=https://s3.amazonaws.com/new-acct/example.html (is the link pointing to our website). I got this info from a 3rd party tool that our company is using.

Now my questions are:
1.What is the purpose of creating such clumsy links? The referring URL is related to a high authority website. Backlink to our company website is with a clumsy URL as well.
2.This are links created by some other person and not by us. How much this can have negative effect to our website?
3.What we need to do to solve this issue.
If I am not clear, please let me know.
Regards
Utsav

[edited by: not2easy at 2:19 pm (utc) on Sep 6, 2019]
[edit reason] readability/Charter [/edit]

[not2easy]

I have 'anoymized' your examples as we don't post actual URLs here, my intent was to keep it clear but not exact.

As for bogus backlinks, those appear to be using a redirect script to manipulate the URLs. The actual links/URLs likely do not exist and Google can detect the redirects so I would expect them to have no effect in the long run. It can be distressing to find these things, but in my experience I have seen that Google does not put any value on them and it would be a waste of time to pursue any action at all. Do not disavow these links, ignore them.

The apparent ".gov" link does not exist, if you visit "https://department_us_govenrment.gov/" you will not find anything. Note the spelling of "government" which even if it were correct is not an actual URL. Google understand link/backlink manipulation and the offending (amazonaws) source will likely be gone within a short time.

[tangor]

While it is probably a waste of time, the referer (sic) urls can be dealt 403 and most of these will have relatively easy to pattern criteria. I have no facts to support that g will notice, but it will certainly clear your log files in a more efficient manner than 404s (after all, the links are invalid, correct?).

As not2easy notes, the manipulation is well-known by se's and is unlikely to be a negative factor for your site.

[new_seo]

Thanks to "not2easy" to "tangor" for your valuable suggestions. I was also having a feel that these types of links are not going harm. Because Google is smart enough to identify such issues. But my main intention of raising this question is to know if anyone have seen such type of links before and what is the purpose of creating such links.

[not2easy]

I have seen them before though not identical to yours. In one case it turned out to be someone "claiming" my URL as their ad landing page so I disallowed Google's AdsBot in robots.txt since I was not using any AdWords campaign (now Google Ads) at the time. That ad link redirected to a blank WP domain with nothing but "Hello World" on it. That was over a decade ago.

The last similar group I saw were gone by the time I noticed them in GSC. That was just over a year ago. That one showed over 60,000 links to a 35 page site. I have no idea what their purpose was. Since they were gone when I found them listed, there was nothing to check.

I don't know if there is any definitive way to figure out the "why" for these situations since they may be anything from mistakes to fraud to competitors.

[new_seo]

Thanks for such a nice explanation;as I mentioned earlier - that our company is using a third party tool for SEO Audit and they provide the list of backlinks along with there status. Status of these types of links are showing either "removed" or "dropped". Still for future, I was looking for a inside story and got it from here.
Thanks again.