Allo Allo! What's going on here then!

I've been given a site to clean up the link profile. On examination of the links from Google Webmaster tools there are probably a good 50 partial match emd .info domains showing up as linking to the site. However when clicked they all go to the same landing page.

My understanding is not great. I take it they are doing a 301 to the niche related landing page which I get.. but why is Google also reporting them as linking to this site. Excuse my ignorance in these matters!

Sorry I don't follow... you have 50 .info sites that link to the website you are working on. What is happening from here? Apologies but I can't quite make out what you mean :/

bplumb said:

Sorry I don't follow... you have 50 .info sites that link to the website you are working on. What is happening from here? Apologies but I can't quite make out what you mean :/

Click to expand...

No probs. I'll try to explain better. I'm probably going to submit a 'disavow links request' for this site (the pros and cons is a different argument altogether that I don't want to get into).

In downloading a list of links from the webmaster tools account associated with the site in question, I have found around 50 domains listed by Google as linking to it; when in fact they are actually all 301'd to another site.

So my question is why Google thinks they are in fact linking to the site I am trying to clean up?

All sites are in the same niche so I'm trying to work out if there is some sort of hack going on?

Howdy.

How strange. Okay, It is possible that the site(s) linked to you in the hope that you would note it (say through Wordpress Trackbacks) and would then link back to them. They could build up multiple backlinks for each of their websites and then redirect them all to a new website, passing on some of the link juice.

I'd be keen to hear what other people think, but this is one possible explanation...

setup and use linkdetox, it'll save a buttload of time playing what if and does this help or hurt
(no i have no affiliation with the service aside from having recently used it to recover a site for a client)