How are our competitors getting these inbound linking domains?

[jozaksut]

I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.

[carinoverturf]

Hey guys,

Yep, Keri is correct, unfortunately We found a bug in ourJuly index with our new crawlers - they were crawling binary files as if they were links and, since they are not normal links, the crawler couldn't handle them very well.

We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites. The reason for these odd inbound links from high-authority sites is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download (i.e. binary) links. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is why you’re seeing inbound links to pages that don’t really exist.

There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need a few more weeks to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for another update, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better!

The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these phantom inbound links.Thanks for your patience!Carin

[KeriMorgret]

I think you might be seeing a bug in the way OSE is treating binary files as having links, starting with the July update. See this thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/latest-ose-update-strange-numbers-and-links while I ask for Carin to step in and comment on this question.

[AnthonyMangia]

Here is a good list of them from Parallels.com.  The Page strength is only a 17, but the domain strength is 100 and the links are not nofollowed.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=download1.parallels.com%2FPlesk%2FPPP9%2FFedoraC6%2Fparallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090204.18_os_FedoraCore_6_i386%3Fid%3D323%26sub_id%3D44465

[jozaksut]

Here are a few I've found (beware, I don't trust these links really):

http://download1.parallels.com/PPSMBE/10.2.0/unix/ai/parallels_installer_v3.5.2_build091201.14_os_FedoraCore_8_i386?mode=past&pn=22473

http://www2.census.gov/census_2010/03-Demographic_Profile/DPSF2010_Access.accdb?p=17259

http://suckerpunchmovie.warnerbros.com/videos/sp_banner.f4v?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8D%E3%83%88%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AB%E3%83%96%E3%83%BC%E3%83%84%E6%AD%A3%E8%A6%8F%E5%93%81%E3%81%8C43%EF%BC%85OFF%EF%BC%81

[AnthonyMangia]

I'm glad you posted this, because I noticed the same thing with one of my competitors as well.  It was a file from Parallels.org, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was.  Anybody got an answer?