Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?

[asbchris]

Hello Moz Friends,

So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point.

You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages.

My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing.

Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary?

Thank you for your thoughts friends!

[Marcus_Miller]

It sounds very low quality so either way I would simply ignore these. If you want to be sure crawl the linking sites in Screaming Frog or some such and look at the external links tab. You can then find the page(s) with the external link. It is likely these were part of a link network and have since dropped and are no longer counted.

Either way, even if they are helping (which they are probably not) you don't want to copy a broken, backwards strategy - focus on quality and your link building efforts will have longevity.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

[asbchris]

Thank you! And yes I do agree on the quality links, I was shocked to see so many crappy back links.

[Bigb06]

Hello, I think you should focus on authority links form your competitors, top links, opportunities or great source of links from other websites you analyzed link profiles. Drop the odd links, and focus on top ones !

In addition, if links are temporary and on parked domains (so low quality links), they can hurt competitor rankings after next penguin update.