Blocking crawlers to your PBN? Try redirecting instead

An ahrefs report is telling me that a blatant PBN 302 redirects to a competitor's site.

At first I thought that the competitor might be using the PBN to rank, but if I look at the site as Googlebot I get the same site I see as any a default browser.

If I set my user agent to "AhrefsBot", I get redirected.

Instead of blocking ahrefs, redirecting the bot to another competitor site is genius. You get to screw with ahrefs' data for the target site, as well as diverting suspiscion.

Except that the competitor will see the links coming to his website, check to see where the links come, and find out your PBN. Not the brightest idea, sorry. Its better if you redirect the bots to some big website in your niche.

That is the reason why those services use more than few crawlers (some % of them are human-alike) so that they catch those sneaky-redirects and adapt the data related to it.

Iknowsomethings said:

Except that the competitor will see the links coming to his website, check to see where the links come, and find out your PBN. Not the brightest idea, sorry. Its better if you redirect the bots to some big website in your niche.

Click to expand...

What do you think about creating a dummy site for the redirects?
This could fool Google and competitors?

opiosko said:

What do you think about creating a dummy site for the redirects?
This could fool Google and competitors?

Click to expand...

Why you would waste time for that? Just redirect the toosl bots to some major website in your niche and thats it. This way it looks natural, bots are happy and everything is OK.

pbn are made diffrent these days .

pbn dont need to hide anythink.

you just use blackhat rules of making pbn but you dont block nothink .

a lot of people are making legit website but using blackhat backlinking ways and domain names and seo ,and having really good results , and becouse there not breaking any google rules they got lifetime pbn.

so your creating a website with blackhat method not hiding it but making it look very legit .

i think the reason ppl started this becouse sick of worring there pbn get shut down .

it not hard to find any pbn being honest it only looking for website that block certain other websites and boom you proberly looking at a pbn.

unfortunatly pbn websites carry simalattary rules, when you no how to make them tracking and knowing there a pbn
not that hard.

the only reason google dont take pbn down becouse it hard to no if there a real website or not , "" hence"" why people are not hiding them these days.

becouse pbn are old know it more likly google tracks pbn in genraul ""hense"" people changing there made ways.

HI, when we do redirection on this way, you only redirect all bots except Google and other Major Search Engine right?
But what is the point of doing this, if you block those bots from your .htaccess when your competitors do search it will not show anything right? isn't better to stop your competitors to check further?

I don't understand why would you need to do redirect unless you do not want your competitors to think "how come this website got no backlinks but its ranking"

Iknowsomethings said:

Except that the competitor will see the links coming to his website, check to see where the links come, and find out your PBN. Not the brightest idea, sorry. Its better if you redirect the bots to some big website in your niche.

Click to expand...

I agree. Redirect to a large site. The competitor in this case is a large site with over 1,000 RD.

nexusseo said:

HI, when we do redirection on this way, you only redirect all bots except Google and other Major Search Engine right?
But what is the point of doing this, if you block those bots from your .htaccess when your competitors do search it will not show anything right? isn't better to stop your competitors to check further?

I don't understand why would you need to do redirect unless you do not want your competitors to think "how come this website got no backlinks but its ranking"

Click to expand...

Sorry, I should have multi-quoted. I missed the time limit to edit my post above with a reply to you.

Here it is:

If you wanted to identify PBNs, an easy way to do it would be to look for those sites that block all crawlers.

I'm not saying redirecting is better than blocking crawlers entirely, its just something different that I came across and thought was clever. I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere on BHW.

As @redarrow says above, its a case of hiding in plain sight.

Provided you don't link to a direct competitor (just a site in a similar niche), your direct competitors won't know.

To give you a better idea (and this is just an example), the PBN I found might have linked to an affiliate site promoting a small accident insurer in the US. The accident insurer specialised in motor insurance for Idaho residents. The PBN redirected to a larger insurance company in the UK that specialises in a wide range of different types of insurance.

The UK insurance company's SEO team could be aware of the PBN (if it uses ahrefs), but is unlikely to report a site to Google that isn't really linking to it. It took me a while to work out what was going on as it looked like an ahrefs mistake.