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How to Stop Competitors Copying Your Links

2010-09-01 09:19
This is a guest post from John McElborough. It is part of The Bad Ass SEO Guest Blogging Contest. One of the first things we do when building links for a new client is to identify their competitors, work out who 8217;s linking to them using link research tools and try to copy as many of their links as possible. But if you 8217;re an established site how do you stop SEO 8217;s like me mining and cloning your links A while ago I wrote about a technique I use to throw competitors off the scent using a redirect. Its certainly not full proof but following some discussions I had with other SEO 8217;s after writing that post its clear that there 8217;s a concern about link data mining so below I 8217;ve compiled a definitive guide to the methods you can use to keep your links private and prevent cloning of your backlink profile. (If you read all the way to the end I 8217;ll share the results of some recent testing I 8217;ve done which may give you a new technique to try out) Blocking crawlers and backlink analysis tools The simplest way to stop link mining is to block your site from crawlers used by link research tools. There are 3 common data sources used to power most backlink analysis tools: Majestic SEO Majestic SEO uses data from the Majestic12 crawler. It adheres to robots protocol so you can block it using this line in your robots.txt file: User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / SEOMoz / Linkscape SEOMoz 8217;s linkscape index is used by an increasing number of SEO 8217;s via their Open Site Explorer tool and the API. You can block SEOMoz from showing your links using a meta tag in the of your pages. Yahoo This one is subject to change when Yahoo moves fully over to Microsoft. The only real way to block data from appearing in Yahoo Site Explorer and the multitude of 3rd party tools it serves like Linkdiagnosis and Market Samurai is to block the Yahoo crawler. This can be done in robots.txt: User-agent: Slurp Disallow: / This however will block you entirely from Yahoo search results. Most of my sites get less than 5 of search traffic from Yahoo these days but still, its hard to justify cutting this out entirely. I 8217;ve got a better solution below for dealing with Yahoo data. Obfuscate your link data Even if you can 8217;t block competitors from seeing your backlinks entirely you can take steps to make their life more difficult. Building high volumes of low quality links to your site is a good way to obfuscate your data, making it harder for competitors to locate and copy your best links. Yahoo Site Explorer and data accessed via the API will only show the first 1000 links pointing to a page. While Yahoo does tend to show the most important links near the top of their data this isn 8217;t limited to unique domains and doesn 8217;t exclude nofollowed links. As such in order to render your sites backlink data useless to competitors you need to build a few sitewide links on big, well established sites. Blogroll links are good for this. These links are...
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