How to hide your backlinks from competitors?
It is known that competitor backlink analysis is an important part of the work of a SEO specialist. If you are making a PBN, then you probably didn’t really want other webmasters to know where you get your backlinks. A large number of services are involved in backlink and keyword analysis, the most famous of which are Majestic, Ahrefs, Semrush. All of them have their own bots that can be blocked.
One way is to write Disallow rules for these bots in the robots.txt file, but then this file will be visible to everyone, and this may turn out to be one of the footprints by which you can identify the website as a part of your PBN. It is much better to block access for backlink checkers in the .htaccess file. This file is not visible to anyone except you. In addition, by blocking these crawlers, you significantly reduce the load on the webserver.
Here is an example of how this can be done. Just add this code to your .htacess file:
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*aboundexbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ahrefsbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*backlinkcrawler.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*blekkobo.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*blexbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*dotbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*dsearch.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*exabot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ezooms.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*gigabot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ia_archiver.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*linkdexbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*lipperhey spider.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*majestic-12.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*majestic-seo.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*meanpathbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*megaindex.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*mj12bot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ncbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*nutch.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*pagesinventory.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*rogerbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*scoutjet.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*searchmetricsbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*semrushbot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*seokicks-robot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*sistrix.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*sitebot.* botstop
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*spbot.* botstop
<Limit GET POST HEAD>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=botstop
</Limit>
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