Bot Blockers :: Protection from Competitor Reverse Engineering

MuffinS

MuffinS

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Mar 28, 2016
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Hi All, I am doing some nice SEO and I don't want my competitors to find out.

What I used to do was to install a bot blocker that would block all useragents like ahrefs, moz, majestic from visiting my site.

By doing this, on the plus side, competitors will try to do backlink analysis, and be puzzled why I am ranking so well (because the tools are unable to report on the 50 power links I have).

On the other hand, it is a massive tell as I'm sure Google can determine.

What is the best practice nowadays? Block bots, or allow bots and appear "natural".
 
My understanding is that people who are blocking bots are 'gray hat' types with PBNs and you'd bock bots on all your PBN sites to make it harder for random SEOs to reverse-engineer your network.

If you block your money site from being crawled, all the sites that link to you will still be crawled by AHREFS so the data will be available anyway as to your backlinks.

I'm not sure what Google does/if it can figure out when bots from other crawlers are all blocked but if it's done server-side and only apparent when crawling from one of those bots I don't know how they would (doesn't mean it's not possible...). If they could though and most sites blocking crawlers are part of a PBN then I guess it would be a bad signal to have on a money site.

Maybe @Ryuzaki will correct my logic - I know he thinks about privacy around projects a lot more than I do.
 
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