50,000 Links From The Same Website

[calindaniel]

Hey Mozers,

I was conducting competitive research for a client of mine and I discovered one of their competitors has over 50,000 backlinks! After removing my heart from my stomach I realized that 99.9% of the links came from a single website that doesn't have nearly that many pages. Has anyone experienced this in the past? And if so what exactly is going on?

C

[calindaniel]

I was using the Raven Tools Backlink Explorer and it returned the 50,000 odd results. However, I did a review of the website using Open Site Explorer and the amount of links has dropped from 50,000 to about 700.

For anyone who is interested the url is  www [dot] impaireddriving [dot] ca, and the linking website in questions is www [dot] justanotherlink [dot] com.

[MarieHaynes]

I personally wouldn't be too worried.  With links it's not all about numbers but rather about quality.  50,000 links from one website are likely sitewide (i.e. footer) links.  Even if they are followed and pass juice, I personally don't think they are much more valuable than 1 link from this site.

Google is smart.  They can tell when a site has natural votes for it (i.e. backlinks) versus manufactured votes.

[AlanMosley]

i think it is common belief that the first link from a domain is worth the most and then tails off sharply.

[EGOL]

A link on a Blogroll can give you a lot of links.

... but I doubt that 50,000 links from one site is giving you much more value than a few links on same site.

[IM_Learner]

Please give the urls. I suspect it to be a case of parameters

[Theo-NL]

A normal case of this happening is when a link to the website is placed in the footer, which makes it link from all the pages. However, you've mentioned that the website nowhere nearly has that many pages. Perhaps the website is facing canonicalization issues (with several parameters in the URL, mixing up to become a great many number of pages). Have you tried using Open Site Explorer to investigate the issue further?