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I'm seeing some weird backlinks to our site.

For example, there's a blogger with a site that is several years old and looking pretty legitimate, but he has links to our e-commerce home page site from his blog posts that have nothing to do with the type of products we sell.

He has these anchor text that are keywords on our site, but are used out of context in his blog. For example, "... toothpaste caps" where cap is linking to our site where we baseball caps. Or, "... power outlet cap" where cap is linking to our homepage. Now, our last SEO guy, who I think was horrible, used to employ these paid services that would write fake reviews for you with a link to our site. So, it is not impossible that this was a result from that, but I need to find that out.

What exactly is this type of behavior called by SEOs and search engine companies? I'd like to research more into what this is what how it affects our site and where it came from.

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What exactly is this type of behavior called by SEOs and search engine companies?

It's called negative SEO and with companies engaging in such activives in most countries they are breaking the law under 'law jurisdictions under defamation and slander' purposely destroying someone's business should it be bad reviews or negative SEO is most countries is illegal.

But with this said you have only mentioned one link, even with a few its unlikely to harm your SEO rankings unless you have 'few' links, then the ratio would mean you would be more effected by dilution of the keyword 'cap' against baseball and toothpaste.

Your best course of action would either to:

  1. Ignore it those links but keep an eye for new.
  2. Remove those links using the disavowed tool within Google Webmaster Tools.
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  • But what if this was done by a paid service where they write fake review/blog with link that our ex-SEO employed? I updated my post. What is this type of linking called? (so I can read up to study how it might affect our site).
    – laketuna
    Jul 25, 2013 at 20:51
  • bybe's response stands. If you need further action - find a lawyer. Solid answer, bybe
    – Brandt Solovij
    Jul 26, 2013 at 5:03

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