So what's up with UpDowner.com?

[icecarats]

I've noticed these guys in link profiles for several sites I manage. They'll usually show up around 1,000-10,000 times in the backlink profile. From what I can tell they index websites, build up keyword relationships, and then when you search for something on their site (e.g. poker) they'll present a list of related sites with stats about them. The stats seem to be yanked straight from Alexa. Where the backlink comes from is that every time 'your' site shows up for a search result they'll put a little iframe that contains your site. This means if your site's name/keywords are pretty broad, you could be showing up thousands and tens of thousands of times as being linked from these guys on their pages that Google indexes.

And Google indexes, boy do they ever. At the height, they had over 53 million pages indexed. That has apparently shrunk now to around 25 million. I believe their strategy is to generate a crap-load of automated content in the hopes they can cash in on obscure long tails.

So my questions for you guys are:

1. Are you seeing them in your backlinks too?
2. Should I block their spider/referrers?
3. What is their deal man?

[emediaSEO]

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updowner-ignored-15369.html

Looks like Google is on top of these guys so at least their links won't get you Penguinized.

[earwicker23]

I checked out their site. You can register for it and then get your site verified. Then they claim you can get your listing removed. I haven't tried that yet because I'm trying to find out more about them before I do that. I'm curious why they just showed up in my Google webmaster listing, and supposedly have backlinks from a bunch of my pages--but if you enter that page into their page form, they don't find it.

Does anyone else have any experience with them?

[donford]

Yes I noticed this too, we just got their IP address and blocked their IP through .htacess.