Article with 3843 magical backlinks

[howdo-i]

I was just examining an article on Ezinearticles to find out why it is so high up on in the SERPS. When I went to Yahoo Site Explorer I saw that it has an awesome 3843 backlinks which explains the Google ranking.

The thing is that I have visited a number of the pages that are supposed to be linking to this article and so far I haven't found a single backlink on any of the pages.

How is this being done? Is it a Black Hat technique? and if so will the search engines catch on eventualy?

Steve

[paulgl]

Without knowing what the article is, hard to say.

Yahoo will not give the same number of backlinks as google.
Looking at yahoo's links and trying to extrapolate what google
thinks is like comparing apples and oranges.


Did you try and check ones that should be there? Did you check
the number of backlinks that google has?

Many low value backlinks disappear. That's why one should
not concentrate on low level, but high value.

The age of the article would also be a factor.

Paul

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Without knowing what the article is, hard to say.

Yahoo will not give the same number of backlinks as google.
Looking at yahoo's links and trying to extrapolate what google
thinks is like comparing apples and oranges.


Did you try and check ones that should be there? Did you check
the number of backlinks that google has?

Many low value backlinks disappear. That's why one should
not concentrate on low level, but high value.

The age of the article would also be a factor.

Paul

Hi Paul, thanks for the input.

My question has nothing to do with how many backlinks google can see. I never check google backlinks because it is never even close.

The point is that yahoo shows more than 3000 backlinks and not one of the pages that it reports contains a link to the article in question. There isn't any evidence that there is any kind of linkroll that would show the link temporarily then dissappear either.

I'm guessing that something sneaky is going on. Perhaps this is some kind of black hat network that conspires to show the search engine spiders something different to the rest of us.

I wonder if there is a tool that can mimick an SE spider and show me what the SE can see. Hmmm.

Steve

[Peter Gregory]

Originally Posted by howdo-i

Hi Paul, thanks for the input.

My question has nothing to do with how many backlinks google can see. I never check google backlinks because it is never even close.

The point is that yahoo shows more than 3000 backlinks and not one of the pages that it reports contains a link to the article in question. There isn't any evidence that there is any kind of linkroll that would show the link temporarily then dissappear either.

I'm guessing that something sneaky is going on. Perhaps this is some kind of black hat network that conspires to show the search engine spiders something different to the rest of us.

I wonder if there is a tool that can mimick an SE spider and show me what the SE can see. Hmmm.

Steve

It is possible that the links were removed and yahoo still shows them. Not sure how many you actually checked, but it is possible.

Also here is a tool that will let you see what any site/page looks like when a spider crawls: Search Engine Spider Simulator

[bkilela]

This is an interesting to invetsigate.

If this is a tool it will throw off many IM businesses. It would definately change the internet game altogether.

On the other hand the owner would mak a windfall before other users pick on what they are doing.

One mans loss is another mans gain

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by Peter Gregory

It is possible that the links were removed and yahoo still shows them. Not sure how many you actually checked, but it is possible.

Also here is a tool that will let you see what any site/page looks like when a spider crawls: Search Engine Spider Simulator

Hi Peter. I'm not sure that this tool will do the job. It's designed to show you what the spider sees when it visits the page yes but I'm not sure that it mimics the http headers to fool the page into thinking that the spider came from Yahoo or Google. My theory is that some kind of cloaking is going on.

Steve