Strange links to site

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sean11

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Feb 3, 2011
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Hi All

I am seeing something a little strange and wondered if you could shed some light as to what might be happening.

I have started to notice I am getting links from sites to pages that do not exist o my site - they are 404 if you attempt to visit them.

I am also seeing the same thing trying to link to nonexistent images on the site, but always .swf files?

My first thought was it is some sort of negative SEO but why target pages that are not there?
 
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Without more information, it could be due to several things. Someone might be sending out spam emails from your domain, your site might have been hacked with spam/broken links to hidden pharma pages, someone may have resurrected an old site with legacy links, it could be malicious etc.

Is it a wordpress site? Are the backlinks going to hundreds of different links on the site or just 3 or 4? Whether it will damage your site: there's no way of knowing without more info but it's possible.

Quick "fix" is htaccess redirects to existing content. But, if it were me, I'd be trying to find out what's changed recently to get an idea of why it's happening. Do you have access to server logs?
 
I'd request you to please check the access logs if you've ssh access.
It seems your site is hacked and mails are going out from them.
Or else, are you using wordpress outdated theme?
Try to check that too once.

If you need help with the path for acquiring details then they are given below:

/usr/local/apache/logs/access_log

or

/usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log
 
Apricot said:
Without more information, it could be due to several things. Someone might be sending out spam emails from your domain, your site might have been hacked with spam/broken links to hidden pharma pages, someone may have resurrected an old site with legacy links, it could be malicious etc.

Is it a wordpress site? Are the backlinks going to hundreds of different links on the site or just 3 or 4? Whether it will damage your site: there's no way of knowing without more info but it's possible.

Quick "fix" is htaccess redirects to existing content. But, if it were me, I'd be trying to find out what's changed recently to get an idea of why it's happening. Do you have access to server logs?
Click to expand...

Thank you very much, great tips.
 
No I have not seen any negative impact, but would rather not wait till I was kicked out of the SERPS.

I have disavowed the links, was thinking maybe they thought I would redirect them to a money page and then the penalty would kick in?
 
I can get the server logs, it is not a wordpress site it is a CMS but one that was built in house.

it is only a few pages & they are not pages that have existed in the past, so they are not old links that have been resurrected, I thought that might have been the case and I checked the site history but there are no references to these pages.

I will continue with my research and if I find anything interesting or there is any negative impact I will report back

Thanks for the suggestions
 
Try visiting the website with a referrer from yahoo/google - your site is hacked and those pages cloaked based on hwere you came from. I had the same thing happen to me. As a test, check what google has indexed for your site - site:domain.com and you'll see some of those pages.
 
Will do thanks for that I had no thought of checking as Google or Yahoo
 
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