Brand new domain with a lot of old links.

[StalkerB]

So I just bought http://penny-auctions.co/ a couple of days ago, ignore the fact it's not set up yet and generally just a mess, and something kept bugging me about why the domain authority kept showing as 25 in the SEOmoz toolbar.

Now initially I'd set it up as www. and with the trailing slash so the PA was 1, however after a bit of exploration it seems that someone has been building links to the non-www version of the domain for at least a year!

The site has never been owned before so I've now made the non-www version the default and have a 5 day old site with PA 35 and DA 25!

SEOmoz shows PA - 45 links, 20 domains and DA - 341 links, 113 domains.

Majestic Historic - 8598 links, 236 domains and Fresh - 160 links, 62 domains.

Brilliant! Except they're all spamtastic.

What do you think this will do for my future attempts at ranking?

Should I create pages that have links to them or just 301 them?

[StalkerB]

The FTC? Oh you crazy Americans

Yeah, might all go south, but meh, get nothing if you don't try : )

I'm just being an affiliate, not going to run one (even though there's a billion scripts to do so).

[icecarats]

Based on what I've seen of how other penny auction sites work the spammy links probably aren't even going to hurt you. Being lumped into the penny auction category probably will, but that's another matter. Check out the backlink profile on domains like Zeekler, QuiBids,zBiddy, etc. and you'll probably see far worse. The majority of these operations make their cash through affiliate signups, which means a lot of relatively low value affiliate links as well (Zeekler especially has Google bombed every 'Zeekler + phrase' search result). You could probably stand out by doing 'good old fashioned seo' on it, I think Bidz.com is trying to go this route and they're one of the bigs.

Personal opinion here, not criticizing you: I think the penny is going to drop on these penny auction sites soon. The FTC hasn't said they're legal, hasn't said they're illegal, just that they're not covered by current laws, and the legislation may soon change to take care of that.

[StalkerB]

That's never going to happen, too many on clearly unmoderated sites.

If I was spamming myself (not that I'd ever advocate such behaviour) I'd just have kept up the velocity until I broke through but the fact they're a year or more old makes me wonder...

I'll probably sort the site out properly, add a bit of decent content and then decide whether to hammer it with more spam and/or build some decent links

[MRCSearch]

If they weren't spammy links I'd say damn, you struck some SEO gold. That they're spammy, however, makes me think you're going to have a helluva time trying to pull rank. IMO It'd be worth the effort trying to get the backlinks removed.