Link juice from links that are not on the page?

[overlandundersea]

Hello,

Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle.

When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following:

site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing"

I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description:

"Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?"

Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks!

[overlandundersea]

I didn't think to check the cache. Thank you!

[DirkC]

Not sure if it's a spammy tactic. If you look at the cached version of these pages you'll notice that it contains a section on the right hand site: Travel blogs we like (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GS8irLH9VKkJ:www.travelsupermarket.com/blog/learn-to-make-a-monkey-out-of-a-towel/towel-origami-109/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be) - with a link to "what's Dave doing"

Date of Cache for this example is Sept. 15th. It's quite possible that in the mean time Travelsupermarket decided to drop that section on the page. Normally these links should disappear in the coming months as these pages get crawled again.

Dirk