Hi Guys, I monitor my stats pretty regularly and like to think Im on top of where links to me are coming from. However, over the last few days I seem to have generated several new links to my site that, quite frankly, I dont want. What can I do about it? Those are the external sites that are linking to me and I obviouslyt dont want to be part of a blatantly bad neighbourhood....what can I do about it? Any help would be appreciated, rushy
Dont worry about it, you cant control who links to you and it will only cause you problems if you link to them.
I persume someone has been scraping the search engine results to build spam pages designed to rank well on some low compertition keyphrases. When someone who isn't a search bot look at the page it sends you to the spam casino site. I don't think this can you do you much damage, the only reason they link to your site is because somewhere you turn up in the search results. I can't find any cache for the pages so I think google has already figured out that they are spam and they should disappear on the next update. However if you want to do something about it, report the domain to each of the main search engines. scrape and cloak, scrape and cloak ....
Thanks, Nixies for the input. Bad thing? Its been said that a site participating in 'bad-neighbourhood' link exchanges can receive devaluation in some serps. my worry with this situation was that it would affect my site and thus my ability to rank well in some search engines due to the apparent bad nature of my site. however, as you can see from nixie's post and design agent above, my worry was misplaced. Not a bad thing to get a few second opinions and advice though cheers
The keyword is "link exchanges". You are not providing outbound links to them, so nothing to worry about. I bet this is probably referrer spam, and not actual visitors hitting your sites. People send false referrers to you in hopes that your web stats pages are public and indexed, or perhaps for click through traffic.
Usually scraper sites do not hurt, I however though have had one experience where they did. One of my main sites which ranks very well in google started being scraped like crazy, at first it did nothing, few weeks later however the directories/folders these scraper sites linked to started to be dropped by google. This did not effect my domain sitewide but all directories that these scraper sites had been hitting hard which is the main reason I feel it was directly related to the scrapers. These sites however were also using some redirection methods which I feel probally played a roll into this. If you do however have a problem with a scraper which yanks your hard earned results the easiest method I came up with was using .htaccess to forward all requests for say testdirectory to newdirectory and moving the content to that directory. Within a few weeks google quickly reindexed and reranked these pages very nicely
After reading/researching a lot i dont think its a real problem to be looked into. Interesting point is after posting my problem on various forums, it seems to have been stopped..... lol.. someone tracking me ? who cares though !