Hiding your Back links from Competitors or trying to CONFUSE them is a very interesting question asked by Clients. What would make them fear about or even think about this? 1.They had purchased Links from a blogger and the same Blogger will be more than glad to sell links to competitors. 2.The Client had utilized some unique method and with some close observation the competitor can find out them. 3.Fear about Competitors filing a complaint with Google With Yahoo! Site Explorer’s demise there is no other S.E authorized way to check back links of competitors. Webmasters now have to depend on the paid Back link checkers. You can check back links using link: method in Google but that is like celebrating April Fool’s day with every check. How big are these Back Link Crawlers? They are not bots but bed bugs when compared to the crawlers of Google and other S.Es, they are said to follow a different method to find and calculate the Links & recently they have started to offer social signals. What would be the solution to stop them from crawling my Back links? Get High Quality Links: Any method can be reverse engineered and there are too many good brains in the field who can easily re-engineer any method. So, the best way is to be offensive about Link building and not to be defensive. Offensive would mean to obtain links that are not reachable to your competitors. That said here is a composition of several methods found over the web and a few from my experience. Building your own Network of sites: Yes, but there are many problems like getting reported, getting the entire network tracked by Google. Still some do it successfully in the way it needs to be done J Build Buffer sites & redirect: You can build links to buffer websites and then do a permanent redirect of the buffer sites to your main website. You can use all your INTELLIGENT ways of link building on your Buffer sites, this way they can easily go unnoticed. Use robots.txt Well if you own the buffer sites that link to your main site, you can always block the bots that belong to the major link building software’s. This method will work only if the bots respect “The Robots Exclusion Protocolâ€. Here is a name of some of the Bots Rogerbot – The name of opensite explorer’s Bot. http://www.seomoz.org/help/rogerbot-crawler AhrefsBot - The name of ahrefs.com Bot hxxs://ahrefs.com/robot/index.php MJ12bot – The name of Majestic explorer’s Bot(http://www.majestic12.co.uk/projects/dsearch/mj12bot.php) But there are too many stray bots over the web and their count is increasing. Using .htaccess Only good bots have respect for your Robots.txt. So a better way to get this done is by using .htaccess rules. A sample one can be like this RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^rogerbot [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MJ12bot [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^AhrefsBot RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L] The basic idea behind using .htaccess is to strike at the roots. In this case it is blocking the bots at the IP address level which will be more clean and strict. I have heard about people using the IP deny manager in the Cpanel. You can use the Logs to find out the bots IP address. Developing Special Codes/PluginsDepending on the CMS used you can develop a plug-in that will deny any other bot that tries to access the site. What are the possible Problems? In the process of hiding the back links you may do more harm to your site by blocking the S.E Bots from visiting your site (by mistake). More over if you are going to use this (.htaccess rules/ robots.txt) on a series of websites, this will be an excellent footprint which will land you in trouble. Please excuse me for any Grammar/Spelling errors. English is not my first Language. Hope this will be an interesting read for people.
Alternatively you could just try and do things nicely and not need to bother trying to game the search engine with tricks that will get found out and possibly penalised when you do.
This is not about gaming the SE but the Link checkers. Hope you read the full post Yes i agree with you on not to game the system. About this topic, I was the first one to answer the Poll and my answer was No, i wont hide my backlinks. This is a post to be read by people who are interested in trying out such things
But that is like handing someone a time bomb with a fuse, saying have fun playing this, though it will explode in your face as you do as it upsets the natural linking which spiders will want to crawl and so will likely raise suspision or red flags which light the fuse but hey play with the time bomb anyway...
Yes, as i said it is for people who are willing to try out things. I did mention that there are problems like footprints being left and SE's identifying them . Again i request you to read the full post