External Links through Open site explorer

[hickboy5]

I have just ran an Open site explorer query on our site due to having one of a constant ranking keywords drop, and found that we have 48 new links appear on the report under the anchor text 'home'

These are not normal links, and I cannot see where or how these have been connected to our site

for example:

<colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
|

http://regvac.com/TrIsland.swb

<colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
| http://meteonorm.com/fileadmin/tmy3/722066ndry3.rdm |

<colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
| http://www.sexintheshower.net/downloads/SS960-12-pack.psd?ActDo=ShowArt&Information_ID=2396&Parent_ID=&type=&Langue_ID=An&rubID=3068473 |

My question is how and why are these appearing on the seomoz open site explorer report? What are they? How can I get them removed, and let google know this was nothing to do with us?

Thanks

S

|

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Stuart,

This is a known issue with OSE. Linkscape doesn't quite know what to do with downloadable files and is falsely listing some of them as links. A Linkscape engineer has some more details on this Q&A post at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains. So sorry for the confusion, and we are working to get this taken care of.

[hickboy5]

Thanks for your reply, In fact I did get a responce from one of the webmasters who did in fact clarify that the links are not directing to any webpage - they are download links of files.

So on this note, I think I will follow your direction on this one and not invest to heavily on it. I am however confused why this data only seems to appear on SEOmoz Open site explorer..

Thanks again, and all the best

S

[DanHill]

Excuse me for having a little chuckle at the psd that my firefox tried to download after clicking the sexintheshower link!

But on a serious note, we have links like these too and it has puzzled me in the past.  I've also noticed this sort of thing on competitors sites and to be honest it just seems like one of those things that are best ignored.  It's not going to hurt your rankings in any way and to try hunt down owners via whois lookups etc would likely just be a wild goose chase!

I'm sure there will be someone on here that could give a technical reason why these links appear, but I do believe it's not something to invest much time in