Blocking Ahrefs and SEMRush

[MrMedia]

What is the general view on this? I find the data to be wildly inaccurate but I also see merit in block these crawlers to stop competitors taking advantage.

Anyone done this and if yes would you mind sharing how?

 

[eliquid]

Depends on what you want blocked.

Both can get a lot of the data without crawling your site, but again depends on what you want blocked.

 

[MrMedia]

Depends on what you want blocked.

Both can get a lot of the data without crawling your site, but again depends on what you want blocked.

Thanks man.

I want the data they pull that helps them calculate organic traffic and top pages stopped.

I believe they both respect robots.txt but thats as much as I know.

 

[CCarter]

I want the data they pull that helps them calculate organic traffic and top pages stopped.

Blocking them will not do nothing for that. They get that from the Google search results. Block will just stop their on-page analysis tools of your site.

People will be able to see who links TO you. But no one will be able to see what you are link to from within your site. So external link's backlinks profiles SHOULD not include you.

 

[MrMedia]

Blocking them will not do nothing for that. They get that from the Google search results. Block will just stop their on-page analysis tools of your site.

People will be able to see who links TO you. But no one will be able to see what you are link to from within your site. So external link's backlinks profiles SHOULD not include you.

Got it thanks.

Sucks because at this point their data is so far off the mark I ibelieve that when I come to sell my site some buyers will look at the data in these tools and see a completely innacurate picture.

Obviously serious buyers will rely on all sorts of data points, primarily real world analytics, but it does create a false negative seeing downward trends in these tools.

 

[Smith]

Sucks because at this point their data is so far off the mark I ibelieve that when I come to sell my site some buyers will look at the data in these tools and see a completely innacurate picture.

I can't imagine a buyer is going to look at SEMRush or Ahrefs. The numbers aren't anywhere near accurate enough. In my experience, Google Analytics and Search Console are the only sources of accurate information for a potential buyer.