How to hide my back links from my competitors – SEO

Competitor profileing is one of the best way to get ahead of the game with great tools like ahrefs out there SEO is no longer a guess game. Its getting very important to hide your backlinks from competetors and to block SEO analytic crawlers from giving out data about your activities to the next guy.

There are two simple approaches to do this . You can either use Apache code or just update your robots.txt file with a few lines to block the most popular crawlers.


Block SEO profiles using Robots.txt


User-agent: * Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /
User-agent: SemrushBot Disallow: /
User-agent: xenu Disallow: /
User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: /
User-agent: AhrefsBot Disallow: /


Note Rogerbot is MOZ, Semrush is SemrushBot, Ahrefs is AhrefsBot, MJ12bot is Majestic and Xenu is Xenu

Block SEO profilers using Apache.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*MJ12.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*AhrefsBot.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ domain name . com [L,R=301]
Order Allow,
DenyAllow from all
Deny from 216.123.8.0/8
Deny from ....

Notenginx servers are getting very popular these days and .htaccess does not work with negix so use the robot.text method .   .htaccess will also require you to edit the local Apache config file that will effect the folder its in plus all folders underneath it in the hierarchy. If possible I would use both methods to ensure 100% no access

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