Accidentally generated navigation links that point to American site from Australian site.

[tdawson09]

Somehow we ended up getting hundreds-of-thousands of links coming from our .au (Australia site) to our .com (America site). We believe that something happened during a change that turned a handful of our example.com.au navigational and footer links into back links pointing to example.com and sub-domains of the American version.

We are currently fixing this, but we are wondering if this could potentially be problematic in terms of a penguin penalty due to an unnatural linking campaign or back link scheme. Could this error create major problems for us in the near future if we have corrected the issue? Your thoughts are welcome!

Thanks!

[tdawson09]

Thank you, Cyrus. Your response is very much appreciated.

Since I posted this question, our reports have been showing the links are starting to drop off. I will update this thread if something happens.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Probably not too harmful. Unfortunately, it's really hard to predict. There are three likely outcomes:

1. You get dinged because Google sees these links as manipulative, or alternatively over-optimized.
2. The extra linking (and cross-traffic) actually help you
3. Nothing. Google often ignores links from sites with an administrative relationship

I seriously doubt this would trigger a long term Penguin issue, but as long as your cleaning it up I really don't see what else you can do other than to per-emptively disavow links form the cross-sites. But before doing this, I'd seriously question if this is the route you want to take, as there could be other ramifications.