Backlink mystery ...

So, I was looking at Moz Open Site Explorer and something sparked my attention.

We have 30 links coming from the same blog domain but on different posts. They are worthless links which is why it really got my attention.

I didn't do it. Of course my client didn't do it.

So I went over to Google Search Console/search traffic/links to site, and discovered, of course, Google also has them indexed, but I primary went there to determine the period of time in which these links were created.

All were created in a span of 1 month. Nov 2016 mostly.

Now when I check, today the links do not appear anywhere on the indicated blog post.

So its disconcerting of course to find worthless links and not know where they come from, because I should know, but also got to watch that spam score you know?

1. How did they get there?
2. Why are they no longer there?

The leading theory so far is it was due to an ad campaign from Facebook ... or maybe even Adwords re-marketing, but Adwords campaign has been set for sometime and running well enough to leave it be; therefore, I should find this occurrence more consistently if it were adwords. So I am leaning towards Facebook ads, which we only occasionally run.

However, we never run FB ads for more than a week.

3. As far as I know, Moz has no access to Google index and the links they find are due to their own crawl bots of course. There is no way Moz would have had enough time to index FB ads appearing over the course of a week right? Google maybe, but no Moz?


So we go back to question 1 and 2.

Well lets see what learning might occur on this thread ... aaaand GO!