Website specialists hide backlinks from competitors, this is a brilliant concept that is worth it. If you look at the robots text of any of the sites, you would see that they restrict all the bots from the well-known backlink checking tools, which is something that many SEOs will do.
There are a few different ways to handle this, we will discuss that subsequently. The most common methods remain using the robots.txt file or the .htaccess file
Why Hide Backlinks?
- When competing for rankings for SEO-targeted keywords, the SEO world is a cut-throat environment. When you fail to hide your backlinks, you are essentially handing a competitor a guide on how to duplicate what you have done. Because of this, some people have PBNs (personal blog networks) or paid links that they want to keep invisible
- The internet marketing and SEO industry is getting fiercer. People want to steal your extra effort by any means possible to make their sites rank preferably on the first page. One strategy your competitor can use to outrank your website in the search results is to steal the backlinks. Hiding backlinks in this case can help you maintain your ranking for a longer time.
- Some bots consume bandwidth and this can slow down your server, when you hide your backlinks, you will prevent the slowing down of your server
- Copyright is important, you will not want to be sued for intellectual theft when you are the rightful owner. When your backlinks are not visible, you can preserve the authenticity of your data
How Do Tools (bots) Find Your Backlinks?
Here, we will explore how bots spot backlinks, they do it in various ways that will be discussed below.
- The most popular tools have their own crawler that finds web pages and follows links to new web pages like Google. They keep going through the process until they have saved every linked web page on the internet. Unlike Google, which employs an algorithm to group this information into the search results you see, SEO tools make this data publicly accessible. This effectively makes it possible for anyone to imitate your efforts
How To Hide Backlinks From Competitors?
Hiding your backlinks simply means blocking the bots that see them. The first step in doing this is to identify the bots. You can use two things to identify a blog.
- the IP address that the bot uses
- The bot’s name, or “User Agent String,” as it is commonly pronounced.
The Weblogs are the greatest place to look for them. Web logs have all the visitor information in them. It could be tough to identify the bot if you have a lot of data on it. It saves time if you already know the names of the bots.
A bot is identified by its “User Agent String,” which is essentially a brief name. You only need to use a small portion of a bot’s name to distinguish it from other bots
Identify The Bots You Want To Block
There are various kinds of bots but the common ones are the rogerbot, mj12bot, ahrefsbot and semrushbot. From here, you can pick the bots you want to block
How To Block With Robots.txt?
There is a feature that will hinder bots to crawl and scrape any data from your website, it is the simple disallow command that will keep your competitors in the dark about your activities. There are many bots that are not well-known, you will need to get them from your server when they crawl your website. Here are a few popular bots that you can disallow
- User-agent: * Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /
- User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: /
- User-agent: AhrefsBot Disallow: /
- User-agent: xenu Disallow: /
- User-agent: SemrushBot Disallow: /
Do not be confused with the codes above, they are simply names of popular bots ‘
- Rogerbot – Moz
- Mj12bot – majestic
- Ahrefs – Ahrefsbot
- Xenu – Xenu
- Semrush – semrushbot
However, it is important to be aware that the robots.txt will not work completely for all bots. Experts recommend that you also use the .htaccess file to block the crawlers from gaining access to your website because bots do not follow the rules laid out by the robots.txt file completely. However, it is essential to block many bots so that your data is kept safe and secret
How To Hide Backlinks With .htaccess File?
Now, to use .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*MJ12Bot* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*AshrefsBot.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.customdomain.com/ [L,R=301]
Order Allow, Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 216.123.8.0/8
Deny from ….
Using the example above will trick the bots to another website. Invisible backlinks do not translate to their absence; websites will still rank well on search engines as far as google sights the relevant keywords.
How To Hide Backlinks With 301 Redirect Hiding Method?
To hide backlinks from crawlers, people sometimes utilize the 301 redirect method, but it is not completely effective. They acquire a separate domain, build backlinks to it, and point it to their main domain. They attempt to conceal their backlinks in this way, but most of the time, bots can detect a 301 redirect.
How To Hide Backlinks With Tiered link Building?
Creating backlinks for your backlinks is the goal of tiered link building. The key objective is to maximize the link juice that travels from your backlink profile to your primary website.
WordPress Plugins To Hide Backlinks From Competitors
The plugins help WordPress incorporate a few extra functions. Therefore, there is no need to perform any manual tasks. You can add the necessary plugin and instantly have the function.
For WordPress, there are two plugins available. Link Privacy is a freemium alternative and Spyder Spanker is a paid plugin.
These plugins prevent web crawlers from indexing your backlinks in their database.
How To Check and Monitor Hidden Backlinks?
You can manage all of your backlinks in one place with the use of Hyperchecker.net. Upload your backlinks to Hyperchecker, and it will keep track of them whether they are hidden from ahrefs, semrush, or other bots. You can enable automatic backlink checking daily, once a week, or once a month. The Hyperchecker examines the response code, Google indexing, anchor text, and additional elements.
Final Words
However, the majority of link crawlers disregard robots meta directives. Additionally, any crawler that enables users to alter their user-agent (like Xenu) will only take into account robots directives for the user-agent that is currently in use. Many individuals switch to the “googlebot” user-agent. To effectively stop malicious crawlers, you must thoroughly examine your server log files and compile a firewall list. But if you utilize your firewall too aggressively, you run the risk of banning legitimate users and email. for the safety and data integrity of your website, it is best practice to hide your backlinks!