We can all agree that one of the basic principles of SEO is assessing the back links going to your competitor’s websites. In fact, you may have heard the age-old advice that you should keep a list of your top three competitors, continually check their back links, and try to replicate them. This actually works quite effectively if you are hoping to rank high for targeted keywords and want to beat out your competition.
But what if your competition is doing the same thing to you?
This is where the art of hiding your back links comes into play since they will become invisible to your competition so that they cannot be replicated. With the advice given above, any of your competitors could check out where your links are coming from, like directory submissions, and then submit to the same directory to get the same links and even more than what you already have. This is an easy SEO concept to use for yourself, but to make sure that your competitors do not use it against you, you need to hide your back links.
- Block your site from the Backlink crawlers:
If you are serious about keeping your competition from seeing your back links then you should block backlink crawlers. This includes crawlers like MJ12bot of Majestic SEO, SEOMoz linkscape etc. One extreme measure is to block the Yahoo crawler – Slurp too. Most of the backlink analysis tools rely heavily on Yahoo data. However, this technique might be self sacrificial post Yahoo-Bing merger. - Explode your backlink count:
Having yahoo show 10000 or 30000 backlinks to your website is not a difficult task. You simply need to get some links from some big blogs that have thousands of pages. You can easily find such links from digitalpoint or warriorforum. The other advantage of having this kind of link profile is that it scares your competitors. - Create Invisible Backlinks:
This is also called as gold silver tin strategy. Instead of creating more backlinks, make your backlinks more powerful. So say you created a squidoo lens (Silver site) that links to your main site (Gold site) – now what you can do is to build a lot of free links (tin sites) to this Squidoo lens. Now your competitor sees that you have a squidoo lens however what they don’t see is all the link juice going to that squidoo lens and from there to your site. In short, make your backlinks more powerful so that your actual backlink count is low and doesn’t looks serious enough. - Create noindex pages:
If you are creating backlinks from pages that you can actually control (e.g. some related website of yours) then you can actually hide that page from your competitors by using noindex attribute in meta tags. These pages will still pass link juice but your competitors will never reach them.
Guest Article Writer : This article is a guest post by Nitin Aggarwal from Offshore Ally – a dedicated virtual assistant company. Nitin is actively into web marketing and has been providing virtual assistant services webmaster and SEO’s.
Rahul says
Nice article about links. I thinking hiding your links from yahoo crawler can help you somehow.
Yogesh says
What are the benefits of invisible backlinks?
Cristine says
Yes, What are the benefits of hiding your backlinks from the search engine? Does it help on my business if ever I applied this strategy to my competitors as well as the search engine. I am using colibri tool to check the links I build. Is this tool can still check my backlinks even if it’s visible?