Can blocking crawlers in the .htaccess harm your blogs

If you do this will this prevent sites that need to crawl your site to rank anchors from achieving this goal? Do you really need to block crawlers like Ahrefs/Majestic, etc? Whats the point. If you have nice blogs with great content and you own it who cares who crawls it.

Your competitors can sniff out your PBN and then tell Google. So there is a possibilty of having your PBN deindexed. That's the idea at least. Some say its going overboard. I do it just to be safe. It only takes a couple of seconds to upload a plugin to do this.

Oh you can do a plugin? I thought you had to manually go in and do this. What plugin does this?

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If your network wasn?t made for links/inter linking then it isn?t necessary to block third party crawlers.

But, that said, I know of networks that are intelligently interlinked (not for link juice, for visitors), and they all rank without any problems.

Think in terms of something like a site that sell tickets, linked to different games sites, linked to different venue sites.