[HowTo] Hiding your PBN Like The Professionals – And Why Doing It Flawed = Deindexing

After working with PBNs for some time and studying all types of issues about hiding your domains from ahrefs/majestic/moz I made a decision to do a little analysis by myself and conclusively discover out what’s the correct strategy to conceal your PBN domains with out leaving a footprint.

At the moment, there are two methods everyone seems to be conscious of for hiding your backlinks so they do not seem in hyperlink checkers like Majestic, aHrefs and the remaining:​

The Robots.txt file is supposed to inform crawlers behave on a sure website, what to index, what to not index and the way usually to do it.
Through the use of the command:

Person-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

If the ahrefs crawler abides by the robots.txt guidelines (which from my expertise does), your PBN website will not be included within the aHrefs hyperlink index.

Nevertheless, there’s one huge downside with this – some hyperlink checkers MIGHT NOT respect these guidelines, and extra importantly – EVERYONE, together with Googlebot can learn this file and discover out that you don’t need your website listed by hyperlink crawlers. I’ve analyzed a whole lot of legit websites and only some had this rule of their robots.txt file. This makes utilizing a robots.txt file A HUGE FOOTPRINT. Should you do not imagine me, and you’re utilizing this methodology, merely get one in every of your cash websites that’s backlinked by a PBN amongst different hyperlinks and undergo every linking area and verify its robots.txt file – as a rule, the one domains linking to you which have these guidelines within the Robots.txt file are your (or another person’s) PBN.

The .htaccess file is totally completely different. The .htaccess file is a configuration file that tells your internet hosting what to do in sure conditions. In our case, it’s used to inform the website hosting – “If ahrefsBot or MJ16 tries to view this web site, redirect them to Wikipedia.org”. When the ahrefs crawler tries to index your PBN area, and the .htaccess file is ready up correctly, the ahrefs crawler will obtain a 301 redirect to Wikipedia (or any website you place in there) – it will not know that you’ve another content material in there.

The largest benefit of the .htaccess file is that you’re the one one who can see it. When google visits the web site, it will not discover ANY distinction in any respect. When an individual visits your website they will not discover something completely different.
Briefly –

Robots.txt – footprint – anybody can see it!
.htaccess – solely you may see it, no footprint!

How one can arrange the .htaccess file to cease hyperlink checkers from indexing your PBN domains:
This may be performed pretty straightforward from cPanel, and I am going to stroll you thru it:

1. Log in to cPanel

2. In cPanel, press on File Supervisor:
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4. Within the listing of recordsdata, choose the file referred to as “.htaccess” and press on “Edit” from the highest device bar

5. As soon as the editor opens up, add the next proper after the road “RewriteEngine On”:

#First we make it possible for every request has a user-agent (legit browsers at all times use these, search engine crawlers as properly)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]
#Subsequent we block the bots
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*AhrefsBot.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*.* http://www.bing.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*MJ12bot.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*.* http://www.bing.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*rogerbot.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*.* http://www.bing.com/ [R=301,L]

You possibly can block different user-agents in there by including:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*<useragent_name >.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*.* http://www.bing.com/ [R=301,L]

and you may as well change the redirect area.
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To check if it really works, you should utilize Screaming Frog search engine optimisation by altering the person agent through Configuration -> Person Agent and altering it to one of many blocked robots. If a information is required on verify this let me know and I am going to submit one.

When you’ve got any questions, submit them beneath and I am going to do my finest to reply them.
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