When you’re building a site in a competitive niche, you know that everybody is doing A LOT of research on their competition.
And when the competition is cut-throat, then that research can and will be used against you.
One of the best ways to get a good look at your competitors’ backlinking is by using Majestic, Ahrefs or Moz.
When they find your backlinks they can:
- impersonate an agency doing SEO for you and request removal of “bad links”,
- duplicate your backlinks if they’re open to all,
- report your PBNs to Google’s web spam team.
So the best way to hide yourself from the competition is by blocking all of the mentioned bots.
There are multiple paid and free options out there, from Spyder Spanker, Link Privacy to Spider Blocker. I prefer and use Spider Blocker on all my websites because it’s published on WordPress.org.