Bad links pointing at you - or (Are you from Mars?)

[universal4]

Recently, although I have been accused of coming from Mars, I would like to assure everyone that I am not although I have had some training from Planet Whoopass.

The reason this post is in the seo section is that I am compiling information and data concerning those who would put up pages on sites that continin 404 links to OUR websites.

I have been seeing this happen to my own site as well as those of some of my friends for a long time now.

Today I decided to research a new set of them and found that although there were 4 or 5 new domians with 404's pointing at one of my sites, ALL of them were tied in to the SAME affiliate.

I promised this individual a bit of time to discuss the situation with me, before I made the entire case public, and in the next few days I will be contacting the individuals affected by this if I can.

Currently I am still in the "collecting evidence" stages and it got me to thinking about putting together a spreadsheet possibly of others that also might be affected by this to see if I can pin down any patterns and possibly reduce this problem, or at least gather enough evidence so that we can collectively figure out if the bulk of this issue is coming from a handful of seowannabe's that do not know what they are doing, or some seowannabe's using automatted software with flaws, or a combination of the above.

Sooooo....if you have logged in to your webmaster account and you suddenly see 404's pointing at you from sites you never heard of, we should talk. Are the 404's because the jerk started a new sentace immediately following a link to you, thuse creating a page name that doesn't exist?

The case I am working on today has 14 different pages with 404's pointing at me, from 4 different domains. In each case the pages are full of bullshit, poor grammar, and I believe stolen blurbs of content. In each page there are 3 or 4 or 5 different domians that have a 404 pointed at them, and only ONE REAL LINK, pointing at the website the page was generated for.

If you feel you may have been a victim of a similar situation, be sure to save the page locations etc an get a hold of me so we can look at it.

This may or may not lead to a reduction in this happening, or maybe even lead to exposing the flaw in some of this autoposting software....

Rick
Universal4

Side note: let's disreguard the stupid seowannabe sites that perform seo scans on websites, then link to you from the results pages. (Dozens of these sites all suffer the issue of truncating the link to you - and those I would like to deal with in a different list.) If they aren't smart enough to make the damn link field in their database a little longer, they have no business trying to sell seo services or software and do NOT deserve to be able to link out to our websites in any way.

I do however want to expose those sites in a different thread so that we might collectively apply pressure to them to stop truncating links....their flaw is that they simply refuse to put the entire link on the page....duh...they pretend to be seo people and they LIKE filling their site with tens of thousands of 404's?????

[universal4]

Actually this problem is now getting worse, and I also found out the jerkwad who suppossedly hired the seowannabe to run his link program is also one who runs around stealing exclusive bonus codes from site. (I have been requested not to publish those details)

This spamming person is NOT a member here as far as I know, and as far as i know the idiot seo wannabe isn't either, but if that ever changes you can be assured I will let everyone know immediately.

I need to compile a report of all the bad links currently in my WT account, then visit each page and compile a report of who all this affects so I can notify those affected.

I do in fact have the email addresses of the person who runs the site advertised on the scummy pages containing the bad links, as well as the email of the person that person claimed created the bullshit content and bad links.

I will also have to create entries in my htaccess file to fix these. The sad part of it in many cases I can NOT use wildcards to fix them since many are for images and if I use a wildcard to fix an image link 404 and point it to a page, it can put the browser into an infinite loop any time a page is called contining that image.

My guess is that these pages are at least somewhat machine generated, and when it contains a link instead of a space at the end they just start a new sentance.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

Based upon a few questions I got from this thread, I will attempt to try and explain this better.

Basically, what they do is steal little blurbs from sites all over the net, and put up pages with those blurbs, and all kinds of other bullshit content on the page as an article. For the purposes of the discussion, we will call the article written "content".

This content will contain a lot of different keywords, and often a lot of bullshit totally unrelated to gaming, so this shows they are not only amateurs, but also pretty damn stupid.

Embedded within the "content" will be links to sites (some mine - some to others).

Sometimes the links will be to a page, but lately the trend I am seeing is that they are directing the links to images which will certainly make the htaccess fix more time consuming, since so far the logic I have been bouncing around inside my clearly empty brain has been that each individual link will need it's own entry to redirect the 404 link to the correct link.

Obviously I am VERY hesitant to post links to the pages with the 404's, the last thing I want to do is help the bullshit fake articles rank well for nay keywords.

Now, the major problem with the links, is that in almost all cases (see almost disclaimer below), is that when the link ends, they start a new sentance without a space. this means the link is similar to:
http://www.domain.com/imagefolder/image2.gifNew sentance of more bullshit.

So the 404 is pointed at me (and others) http://www.domain.com/imagefolder/image2.gifNew

Now, on each of these article pages will be ONE real link to the spammers site, so it is always very clear who is ultimately behind the benefit the seo wannabe was trying to and failed miserably with their spammy scam tactics.

I have read a number of discussions about how much this can hurt a site (if at all).

As far as I am concerned, I do not like 404's pointing at me, and for the seo sites that do this by the thousands by truncating links, personally they should all be moved to the last page of results, and they should be sued for the bandwith they use up....but that is a different discussion.

I think this explanation is about as detailed as I can provide.

Rick
Universal4

I said almost above because so far I do remember finding a real link to XXXXXX's site 1 time. (I didn't mention whose site that was because once I get the time to get the research done, I will investigate whether they are an affiliate of said owner's so I can ask them to show them why they should have been more responsive to working this out.

[thebookiesoffers]

I think a good old Kangeroo Court is in order and we tar and feather the affiliate guilty or not

[edgarf76]

I have written articles that GPWA was the source and I am pretty sure I put a link in to properly cite the source. I do not think any of those links are 404's and I have only done this a few times such as the case in the thread about Anderson Silva getting defeated and whether he threw the fight.

[universal4]

I need a few hours mebbe to go through each page and compile the data and figure out how to approach the situation without giving a lot of traffic to the article pages, and I will try and set that time aside to do so soon.

When I first posted this I was really angry, still am but at least now I have taken the time to get in touch with the party involved, they tried to blow me off a few times and when I stayed on it they finally gave me an email of the person who supposedly did it, and that person blew me off and ignored me completely I think.

I happened to notice in WT the other day the # had shot up again and researching them it appears there are close to 40 from pages all promoting this single site, so it is a little targetted.

I think I am most concerned with notifying those that have 404's pointing at them, and discussing what steps can be taken to combat this case as well as possibly coming up with something we could recommend to others when it happens to them.

I might have just done the htacces file and been done, but when I cross-referenced this with some complaints about bonus code stealing concerning the same site I figured I wanted to approach it differently.

Rick
Universal4