Funny backlinks from us

[John Logsdon]

Hi all

I had a request from someone to whom a site I am hosting had linked in the
blogroll because, according to Google Webmaster Tools, we were contributing
43000 backlinks! This is entirely innocent of course - I have removed the
link for the moment (Market Samurai showed a decrease from 102000 to 51000 as
a result).

I am wondering where this has come from or whether it is a glitch chez Google.
Whatever it is, I don't want to mess his PR up.

Our site has 383 entries in the sitemap.xml file and Market Samurai notes 716
indexed pages and 10,857 backlinks to us.

WordPress 3.4.1 fully updated with WordPress SEO installed but the sitemap.xml
switched off because I like to see what is in it! So I have Google XML
Sitemaps plugin installed instead.

Any clues would be welcome.

--
Best wishes

John Logsdon

[Rhys Wynne]

If the site is in the blogroll, then there probably are links from everywhere, even those not within the sitemap. For example, from pages such as domain.com/posts/2, or if you have comment pagination, or archives, or tags, or any page that has the blogroll, it'll appear.

Ask your client to download all links. GWT recently introduced a feature where you can download all links from a site, download that and see if you can glean anything from that.

I don't think it'll cause that many issues, otherwise anybody who has a blogroll on their site would be battered in Google. I'd wait a wee bit before sticking the link back on. I don't think 43k backlinks from a WordPress site isn't dodgy, 43k backlinks, disappearing one week and reappearing the next looks a little more :)