Is there a way to hide backlinks from competition?

[Banned member 185991]

Only downside is that you won't have relevant metrics on your money site cause, your pbn wont pass juice - according to these sites (majestic, moz, ahref, etc)

Why is that a downside? Who cares about majestic? Do you think Google gives a fuck about TF?

These are companies trying to work out what google do, Google don't have moz/ahrefs/majestic metrics as a ranking factor.

 

[THUNDERELVI]

P.s: cloaking isnt cheap at all, especialy if u working with micro niches.

PPC cloaking is expensive, this one is easy as fuck if you know a bit of programming and if you don't, outsource it on fiverr or some freelancing site, it won't cost you more than $100 tops. But honestly, I don't see the point of cloaking in this case. You are trying to fool 3rd party link crawlers, which no one gives a flying fuck about. So just blocking them would do the job. As long as you make sure your backlinks are indexed in Google, you are fine.

A better way to fool your competitors would be to mix your backlink portfolio - create "normal" backlinks (web 2.0-s, videos, pdf-s, HQ comments in non-spammy sites, social signals and guest posts in authority sites if you can afford it), index them and then create PBN backlinks and block the bots in those. Your other backlinks will get picked up by the crawlers and your PBN will stay hidden. This will set astray a lot of your future competitors analyzing your site. Of course, depending on the competition and how smart your competitors are, this doesn't guarantee that they won't try to find your hidden PBN in other ways. Experienced SEO-ers will do that, but most newbies won't.

 

[Banned member 185991]

I don't see the point of cloaking in this case. You are trying to fool 3rd party link crawlers, which no one gives a flying fuck about.

You don't want competitors finding these links, that's the point

 

[THUNDERELVI]

You don't want competitors finding these links, that's the point

They won't find them if you block the bots as well. Why is cloaking better than blocking then? That's what I don't quite understand...

 

[Daniel from Linxact]

They won't find them if you block the bots as well. Why is cloaking better than blocking then? That's what I don't quite understand...

Cloaking has a slight advantage if competitors are manually checking your PBN. It makes no difference for crawlers though.

 

[Banned member 185991]

Cloaking has a slight advantage if competitors are manually checking your PBN. It makes no difference for crawlers though.

Did you read Jazzs post?

If I'm a bot and you outright block me, I can put you on my "let's have another look at this" list. In other words, you're raising a "here I am" flag.

 

[Banditoseo]

Cloaking for a bot is creative and blocking a bot is easy. The question is: did you just trip a flag at Google?

No legitimate website owner would ever cloak a website. Few legitimate websites would block a bot.

 

[alott]

PPC cloaking is expensive, this one is easy as fuck if you know a bit of programming and if you don't, outsource it on fiverr or some freelancing site, it won't cost you more than $100 tops. But honestly, I don't see the point of cloaking in this case. You are trying to fool 3rd party link crawlers, which no one gives a flying fuck about. So just blocking them would do the job. As long as you make sure your backlinks are indexed in Google, you are fine.

A better way to fool your competitors would be to mix your backlink portfolio - create "normal" backlinks (web 2.0-s, videos, pdf-s, HQ comments in non-spammy sites, social signals and guest posts in authority sites if you can afford it), index them and then create PBN backlinks and block the bots in those. Your other backlinks will get picked up by the crawlers and your PBN will stay hidden. This will set astray a lot of your future competitors analyzing your site. Of course, depending on the competition and how smart your competitors are, this doesn't guarantee that they won't try to find your hidden PBN in other ways. Experienced SEO-ers will do that, but most newbies won't.

very good strategy.
if i understand correctly, you mean to say that initially we should build all kinds of backlinks except pbn links.. once all the backlinks are indexed... then at this time, we should block majestic/moz bots on money site.. after blocking bots, now we should give backlinks from the PBNs .. this way no PBN will be picked-up from the crawlers..

plz confirm if i have understood correctly.

 

[Banned member 185991]

Cloaking for a bot is creative and blocking a bot is easy. The question is: did you just trip a flag at Google?

No legitimate website owner would ever cloak a website. Few legitimate websites would block a bot.

Google wouldn't know

 

[Banditoseo]

Google wouldn't know

Why wouldn't they know? Everything about your site is fair game. Consider Google's official position on robots.txt:

You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because other pages might point to your page, and your page could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file.​

In other words: we crawl the hell out of everything, and we do not even bother to check robots.txt when crawling a linked page. And that's just Googlebot operating in normal mode, it doesn't get to the deeper levels.

Cloaking is a huge red flag. Google's biggest enemy isn't spam, it's giving grandma malware, and the best indicator of a malware site is cloaking.

Blocking isn't as big a deal for Google, but it's also hard to hide from them. There is no feasible way to block access that isn't visible to The Big G.

 

[jazzc]

Why wouldn't they know? Everything about your site is fair game. Consider Google's official position on robots.txt:

You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because other pages might point to your page, and your page could get indexed that way, avoiding the robots.txt file.​

In other words: we crawl the hell out of everything, and we do not even bother to check robots.txt when crawling a linked page. And that's just Googlebot operating in normal mode, it doesn't get to the deeper levels.

Cloaking is a huge red flag. Google's biggest enemy isn't spam, it's giving grandma malware, and the best indicator of a malware site is cloaking.

Blocking isn't as big a deal for Google, but it's also hard to hide from them. There is no feasible way to block access that isn't visible to The Big G.

Yo, Beavis, we're not talking about blocking or cloaking Google. Try re-reading more carefully before going on a "omg omg Google is GOD" rage.

 

[Banned member 185991]

Google know when you wank.

 

[Banditoseo]

Yo, Beavis, we're not talking about blocking or cloaking Google. TRy re-reading more carefully.

I get it, you're blocking other crawlers. The point I don't get is why you believe Google is completely blind to that.

That's like saying, "my malware site will survive forever, because I don't serve the Googlebot malware." Yeah, Google has seen that one.

"I can serve up one type of content to Googlebot, and another to users!" Yeah, Google has seen that one, too.

Etc, etc.

 

[Banditoseo]

Google know when you wank.

They knew in 2013 when you had wanked, that was the "Monkey" algorithm. Now they know in real time when you're just thinking about wanking. That one is "Dolphin."

And they know when you cloak/block anyone.

 

[jazzc]

I get it, you're blocking other crawlers. The point I don't get is why you believe Google is completely blind to that.

That's like saying, "my malware site will survive forever, because I don't serve the Googlebot malware." Yeah, Google has seen that one.

"I can serve up one type of content to Googlebot, and another to users!" Yeah, Google has seen that one, too.

Etc, etc.

You're still not getting it. We aren't cloaking against all users in general. Try to wrap your mind around it.

 

[Banditoseo]

You're still not getting it. We aren't cloaking against all users in general. Try to wrap your mind around it.

I've wrapped my mind around it. You have a cloak targeted to a crawler, and you think either (1) Google is totally blind to the presence of a cloak on your website or (2) Google is aware of the cloak but is cool with it because it's not against all users in general. I doubt either of those is correct.

 

[BackY]

any ways to know if a certain site has blocked/hidden the keywords?
its kinda not believable to me for someone to rank top10, with only 4 no-follow links lol... right?

 

[KingPotato]

I've wrapped my mind around it. You have a cloak targeted to a crawler, and you think either (1) Google is totally blind to the presence of a cloak on your website or (2) Google is aware of the cloak but is cool with it because it's not against all users in general. I doubt either of those is correct.

Jesus fucking Christ my nigga.

Google isn't fucking hacking your site and looking at the server side code to see if you are cloaking other sites, and even if they did know, they wouldn't give a flying fuck. They only care and notice (sometimes) if you cloak them. And even then they only get pissed if it's to manipulate ranking or fuck with adsense.

The robots.txt shit you quoted isn't even relevant, all they're saying is if you want to block a bitch ass bot don't rely on robots.txt to do it since it can be ignored, rely on another method to identify and block the bot.

EDIT: I feel like you have never cloaked anything in your life and need to get back to basics to get oriented.

 

[harveyslegal]

Most do it through .htaccess

 

[Daniel from Linxact]

Did you read Jazzs post?

I have read jazzc's post. If I would code a crawler I would check for blocking and cloaking either way. Checking for cloaking only needs a comparison of user agent specific HTML hashes in first place.