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.