Latest OSE Update - Strange Numbers and Links

[dunklea]

Hey everyone. I just checked our website in OSE with the latest update and noticed some strange numbers. The number of linking domains skyrocketed from 300 to 785 which definitely caught me off guard. Like all good SEOers I work hard to get links, but in a typical month I usually get between 40 and 50. To suddenly jump up by over 300 seems odd.

Digging deeper, I noticed that some of the incoming link domains could be considered less than trustworthy (pages filled with links), while others I couldn't find at all on the page in question. I also never ever asked for any of these links, nor did anyone on my team.

Should I be worried? I've heard of websites who purposely gain bad links to their competitors in order to penalize them. Is there an easy way to find out if this is going on? Could this possibly be a problem with OSE and just reporting non-existant links?

Thanks for your feedback!

Andrew

BTW, the website in question is www.gooverseas.com

[carinoverturf]

Hey guys,

The issue you are seeing is due to the new OSE update. We have done some updating with our crawler and this index represents the newest version - sadly, with a few bugs...We are looking into this issue and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible!

The newest version of our crawler is built to be fresher, but it is also going much deeper into high MozRank pages. This bug has probably always existed, but has never been obvious since we weren't crawling as deep into domains where there are more download links. We are currently looking into fixing this so these won't be counted as inbound links.

I'm so sorry for the inconvenience - once we get this new version of the crawler dialed and smoothed out, it will be providing you guys a much fresher and higher quality index!

There is another thread regarding this topic, so check it out if you want more information on what is going on with this index.

Thanks,

Carin

[dunklea]

Yeap, we noticed the same thing. A lot of these new links turned out to be weird files. I'm hoping this is just a minor glitch with the latest update of the linkscape, and in the months to come will start to die off.

Good luck!

Andrew

[AaronBrownell]

Andrew, I'm noticing something very similar with one of our sites www.intervention-referral.com

I have an extra 320 linking root domains this month all coming from High Domain Authority sites within deep subfolders and subdomains. According to OSE they all use the same "intervention" anchor text and link to our homepage. However, all the URLs in question point to files that prompt downloads like pdfs, .ppt, .img. etc. I downloaded a few and could not find our text link anywhere. Here is a sample:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Edburkett/slides/burkett10-bilingual_multiview-slides.key?submit=&en=&dt=hin&sitesearch=linguadict_de

http://blogs.oracle.com/warehousebuilder/resource/WindowsLiveWriter-OWB11gR2RightTimeDataWarehousing_1324A/owb_gg.swf?page=2422

http://www.seagate.com/support/software/Theater/EMEA/101/220/v20/install.img?scrBook=Exod&scrCh=19&scrV=6

BTW - We are not outsourcing any seo services so I'm very confused as to what's going on.

Thanks,

Aaron Brownell