Profiling and analysing competitor`s backlinks

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Alex Whalley: Hi guys, dumb SEO Question for you..... :p
  
  Regarding indexing of links - referencing Ahrefs but any web-spider-link-indexing service will provide the same data (assuming everyone is using the same Majestic SEO data) .... but I digress...
  
  Question is this:
  
  Whenever I am doing competitor profiling and analysing their backlinks I always find dynamically created URLs from sites like ASK.com and a heap of really dodgy looking Google powered web browsers (something about a bear from memory LOL)
  
  I dont have an exact URL example at present but if needed I can add more detailed information like the competitor in queestion, the links I am referring to and anything else that might help but I was hoping someone here has experienced the same thing and managed to figure out WTF is going on?!
  
  Not only are these dynamic URLs being indexed by Google, picked up by Majestic and then presented to me through Ahrefs, they are also being assigned a fairly high Page and Domain authority - making me question whether they are in fact contributing to the overall link profile.
  
  Everything I know about SEO (which Ive been doing for 10 years now) tells me this should not be happening and yet I see it ALL THE TIME
  
  Have you seen dynamically generated search parameters within a URL get indexed and added to the link profile?
  
  Sidenote - have I just found the blackest hat SEO ever?! LMAO
• 
  Jim Munro: Hi Alex, thank you for your participation here. :) This is a great question and I am looking forward to reading the responses.
• 
  Dave Elliott: I'm guessing the things from ask.com are all the Google adverts on the bottom and then 302 divert to the competitors page.
  
  If so this is legit and is just a normal adwords advert.
  
  Surprised majestic/ahrefs isn't smart enough to realise that they are adverts and discount them though....
  
  Example ask.com page: http://uk.ask.com/qotd/who_was_the_youngest_person_to_ascend/20160515
  
  Or i'm entirely wrong and need more info!
• 
  Alex Whalley: +Dave Elliott ; I'm think the last line is most applicable but that being said, I also can see from your answer that you are on the right train of thought... hang on I'll log into Ahrefs and get you a specific URL (backlink) - I'll only share the ask dot com links as the other web browser links I referred to are so dodgy as to force a popup (which I manually bypass) so ain't gonna taint this thread with that nasty crap. BRB
• 
  Alex Whalley: http://www.ask.com/web?q=Free%20play%20casino%20game%20pokies%20slots
  
  the backlink profile I found this on belongs to freepokies.com which as you can see is one of the natural results on the page - 6th in fact. it would therefore be fair to assume that I would find this same link in the profile of everyone ranking organically on the page. Would be interesting as a sidenote to see whether this link also appeared in the profile of the paid ad spots on top and to the right of the page...
  
  There are 19 links in total that have been indexed under this domain and the Domain rank is 72 and the URL Rating (as per Ahrefs system) is 12 and 13 across all 19 unique URLs
  
  At first glance it would appear then that these links are contibuting a lot of juice to this site's overall link profile and helping them rank on top. I've been around long enough to know this can't be and ISN'T the case - it's really not that hard to hide your links from even the ahrefs and Moz bots of the world afterall ;) - but again I am stumped as to why I keep seeing these types of links indexed - and contributing such a large percentage of the overall links (around 30%)
  
  I see this on most of the sites within this dodgy vertical I have found myself in (my client pays well what can I say) so am leaning towards a theory based around inner circles, boys clubs, blackhat as fuck SEO and some serious secret squirrel shit - because I'm outta ideas here :p
  
  Oh and I put this question to Ahrefs and the two people who attempted to answer knew less than I did about SEO so I promptly gave up after their 3rd attempt to skirt around the actual question LOL
• 
  Alex Whalley: oh and these links were first seen Jan 5th 2016 and are STILL appearing 134 days after the fact... WHAT THE HELL MAN?
• 
  Dave Elliott: Ok that is weird! By the way they don't come up on majestic! (they and indeed Open site explorer use different indexes).
  
  Ahrefs being silly and i really can't imagine Google counts them as links, so I would just ignore them.
  
  Might be worth submitting a bug report to ahrefs though. They really shouldn't be showing SERPs as being part of a link profile.
• 
  Dave Elliott: BTW bearshare is a p2p file sharing programme. Had no idea that was still going.....or indeed why or how you'd get backlinks from it! (your competitors backlink profile is rubbish!)
  
  My best bit of advice would be to use majestic for your day-to-day competitor checks. Ahrefs is overkill and indexes a lot of ridiculous stuff that no one actually cares about.
  
  I tend to use ahrefs purely for webmaster tools disviow file updates or if there is a a manual penalty that needs sorting.
• 
  Alex Whalley: Thanks +Dave Elliott ;- really appreciate your input and agree with all your points - ahrefs is the most user friendly and offers more IMHO but they also index more - you are certainly right there! Regarding the competitors link profile - it is the worst thing I've seen from a #1 ;ranking website - which only confirms my thoughts that the owner is doing a lot of blackhat shit and hiding link within various blog and link networks so as to keep people like me from finding them ;)
• 
  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:27:39 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/profiling_and_analysing_competitors_backlinks +Alex Whalley
  
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• 
  Alex Whalley: Thanks for that Jim, and I`m sorry I missed the live group chat. Something else to note is that I have only seen this sort of thing when researching this niche (online gambling/slots/casinos etc) I`ll get to the bottom of it one way or another because I have a feeling there is something untoward going on here (insert twilight zone theme music)