Bad Back Links?

[Renners]

Checking the links into our site on Goggle webmaster tools I've seem to have picked up thousands of links into the site with dodgy terms mainly selling the standard drugs most spam push.

I initially thought our database had been hacked but a full check shows it is OK so whats going on?

All the links into our site go to non existant products using a similar construct to our site however the product number is incorrect this results in a redirect to a standard page, should I dump this method of error redirecting and give a hard error?

I'm assuming these links will be detrimental to our site in some way but I not sure how, can any one highlight potential issues?

Regards,
Renners.

[Paul_MN]

Is it a Wordpress site by any chance?

I have seen this happen a few times on Wordpress sites - someone else had the same problem last month: Wordpress Spam From Google SERPS? Will It Hurt Rankings?

[lethal0r]

have you checked the source code of the page it redirects to? they cant pass anything in the url can they? and make it show on the page?

check the backlink profiles of the sites linking to you. perhaps you will get lucky and find something out about the person doing it, a common username maybe or an email address.

[Renners]

Is it a Wordpress site by any chance?

My sites not wordpress however a very quick check of the sites linking in show (the ones I looked at and there are 1000,s) to be Wordpress so they could have been hacked in a similar vein to the other post.

Having checked (yesterday) my rankings for the keywords I target I've not seen any change to the ranking (still No1 ) so I'm fairly relaxed however my visibility score has shot through the roof whiich makes me wonder if these links are causing this, most likely, as I've got around 44,000 back links as opposed to the normal couple of thousand.

I'm tempted to go with the flow and see if I can find a affiliate selling the blue pill (boots do it over the counter now don't they )

Thanks,
Renners