Linking weirdness - 574k links to one of my aff links?!

[baldidiot]

I logged into my webmaster tools today and saw 574,000 links coming from one domain to my site. But the really weird thing is that the links don't point to a page on my site, and instead to my cloaked affiliate link - eg: /weblinks/affiliatelink

I've looked at the source code for the site the links are supposed to be coming from, but there's no link to my site.

Any ideas as to whats going on?

[baldidiot]

Looking into it further, there are a total of 1,675,295 links pointing to one specific affiliate link (blue square bingo), and that link is now showing up on page 1 of the SERPs on google.co.uk for bluesq.

Weird.

[davemerry]

Hmmm... not 100% sure on exactly why this is happening - looks like it could only be a bug to me.

However given it is showing up on page 1 for the term bluesq it might not exactly be a bad thing, unless of course Blue Squares terms and conditions conflict with providing traffic directly through search engines as I know some programs do.

If you wanted to fix this then I would simply add the following line to bottom of your current robots.txt:

Disallow: /weblinks/

This would ensure that no external affiliate links get indexed in the future.

Cheers,
Dave

[best.hands]

Guess: a site wide link that's available during spider crawl, but has already been removed the reason why you see no actual link on the site providing the backlinks. Might be a case of outdated stat response. Let's check if you still get the same stats after several weeks.

[radicaldomains]

i smell endless loop, bots can easily get caught in them

[baldidiot]

GWT is still showing the links as being there...

I'm tempted to 301 the URL to my home page