The Better Way to Hide Links from SEO Crawlers

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It’s no question that hiding links is critical to any successful SEO campaign.
When building links, especially on PBNs and the like, it’s important to block SEO crawlers like Ahrefs (ahrefbsot), Majestic (MJ12Bot), and the like. Most SEOs accomplish through abhorrent .htaccess lists of bots to block.
what are all of these bots anyway?
The current solutions are…
  • .htaccess files
    • Not always applicable if you don’t have full control over the site
    • Often times blocked from being edited
    • Require some technical know-how, updating, and blind trust
    • Footprint if set up incorrectly
      • Blind trust / copying pasting code you find online is bound to lead to problems
      • Most .htaccess codes available online redirect bots to webMD.com
  • robots.txt
    • (lol)
  • WordPress plugins
    • Not so great if you’re not using WordPress
    • Require blind-trust in the author of the plugin
    • Footprint if (when) set up incorrectly (more on that in another post)
Using Javascript, we can abuse the achilles heel of crawlers and have links “hidden” in the source code of a site, but visible on the page load.

This is what the SEO crawlers will see (no visible links), but here is what Google will see.

Because we broke the link up into two parts (variable a and variable b) and combined the variables when the page loaded, we were able to hide our link from third party SEO crawlers.
This requires little to no technical knowledge and relies on simple Javascript. No sneaky redirects or cloaking.
This is helpful for those who are also building links on public facing properties and can place Javascript: most website builders and submission platforms allow Javascript embed within the HTML, but not access to .htaccess or robots.txt. Using this, you can block your competitors from viewing more than just your PBNs!
You can view the code for this here. Replace link with your anchor text, and replace the URL split among the two variables with your own.
After doing so, simply invoke your link by using <span id=“target”></span> instead of the hyperlink HTML code.
And because this post is pure value.. I thought I’d drop some self-promo in here to make it more in tune with the rest of the posts you see on “SEO blogs”. So..