1 Posted by Robin on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

You actually don't want this from an SEO point of view. One of the factors Google and other search-engines can look at is what the quality of your 'neighbourhood' is like - i.e. the sites that link to you.

2 Posted by Martin on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

Yeah, some say that a dirty way to get a competitor of the top spots in Google is to make him the center of a shady network of spammy sites linking to him.

But this might not be the case here. Maybe spammers experiment with the hypothesis "linking to good sites gives your site plus-points in Googles rating algorithm".

Or maybe they try to see if through this linking their site will also show up for keywords that bring up quirksmode. "See, we link to him, we are related"

3 Posted by Martin on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

Or they hope website owners find out about the link, write a blog post about it and link back to the spammy site (without "nofollow").

Like you did :-)

4 Posted by mike amundsen on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

another thng that might be going on here is that the spammer is trying 'leech' some of the target page's rank for themselves.

the idea is, if you have a high page rank, their link to you might boost the ranking of their own page.

as already mentioned, it can have the unwanted effect (for you) of *lowering* your pages rank since it now points to spam.

5 Posted by Kilian Valkhof on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

I would guess these spam sites are made to add legitimacy to, well, other spam sites.

By linking to a non-spam site (you) and spam sites at the same time, it tries to create the illusion that both are legitimate.

Basically, what the others said: they link to random sites to make themselves look legit in the eyes of Google et al.

You do probably want to keep the backlinks to a minimum ;)

6 Posted by Peter on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

Maybe they hope for the "targetwebsite" to show pingback/trackback-links.

Or a section like "Who links to this post"

7 Posted by Greg Whitescarver on 1 October 2007 | Permalink

Don't forget that actual blog owners click on sites that refer to them. That's successful spam in itself.

8 Posted by Thomas Aylott on 2 October 2007 | Permalink

One trick they use is to post a bunch of spam links in your comments, and then get that article higher traffic by linking to it from a thousand places. Thereby bringing up the rank of all those links they posted.

Did you just avert a massive spam attack? Maybe you're about to receive one ;)

9 Posted by Stijn on 2 October 2007 | Permalink

I'm quite sure it's just something like sping[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sping

10 Posted by Hristo Drumev on 2 October 2007 | Permalink

When one site link to your site, this is vote for spam site in your "related" results. Sometimes search engines stores info for "related" search results and in this case this is direct link to spam site, not directly from you, but indirectly.
Another reason is to link to important resources like your site, with hope to receive any benefit from this like more rating. Some SEO specialists think that high rating is possible only when their site link to important sites with high rating.

11 Posted by pauldwaite on 2 October 2007 | Permalink

> Maybe they hope for the "targetwebsite" to show pingback/trackback-links.

> Or a section like "Who links to this post"

Or, indeed, they do it so that links to their site show up at Technorati.

12 Posted by Richard Hearne on 6 October 2007 | Permalink

Most likely to be comment #4 and #6, perhaps a little #11 :).

Your neighbourhood is determined by who you link to not who links to you - if it were the latter it would be too easy to kill competitor sites by pointing masses of spam links at them.

You want to NOFOLLOW that link asap - it's not a good signal, and that page is now getting a ultra trusted link from a high PR site.

13 Posted by Tom on 6 October 2007 | Permalink

Richard I agree this is how the proffesional SEO works they made blogs and in few months they change them to spamy sites like directories or just page with links to they websites. I agree also with "You want to NOFOLLOW that link asap - it's not a good signal, and that page is now getting a ultra trusted link from a high PR site." If You don't do this they will try to do it next time. If You change their link to nofollow someone else will think more is it worth to do it. Regards Tom

14 Posted by Rushh on 9 October 2007 | Permalink

True, as Richard said.. you should nofollow that link asap. Its benefiting the spammers here, which no-one needs or wants!

15 Posted by zeb on 9 October 2007 | Permalink

I think they are trying to get your attention by having you link to them so they can get some traffic and thats what you helped them achieve. You are linking to a spam site in your subtitle and having a bad neighborhood can get you banned from google and other search engines. It now looks even more like a partnership (in the eyes of search engines) where they link to you and you link to them. more red flags for google

16 Posted by BeneWiki on 12 October 2007 | Permalink

i think it has two reasons:

the first one is that they speculate of getting a good trackback or be listed like pauldwaite mentioned before.

and the second reason is to get your attention and you maybe link to that site (for explanation reasons), what u probally have done...

it looks like that spammers are more and more going to be little psychiatrist ;-)