Stealing links is a very popular link building method for many people, including my team. If I can get all of the links someone else has, then build more, I will theoretically outrank them.  That doesn’t always work out because there are many other ranking factors including domain age, age of links (yes, that’s right, the age of your links), quality of the site, on-page SEO, etc.

I posted earlier about how to steal your competitors links, so check that out to learn the easy and difficult methods to stealing links.

So now that you and the rest of the world know how to steal your links, what do you do to protect your sites ranking? The best way is a technique I learned from a lawyer.  He was explaining to me that he had a case against one of the largest companies in the world and has been in the Fortune 500 for many years. As he was deep into this case, he had asked the company for records of his client.  When the company sent records, the sent 27 boxes of records for the client, who had worked for the company for 15 years.  They basically drowned him in paperwork!

How Do I Keep People From Stealing My Links?

To keep people from stealing your links, you utilize similar methods to the lawyer. If you can give them so much data that they can’t sort through it to find your links, you’re successfully protecting your links. For me the easiest way to do this is to buy links in bulk. In the link above about how to steal your competitors links, I showed you two ways to steal them.  Buying links in bulk will protect you from both methods.  Places like Fiverr can give you thousands of links, some on high PR pages at very affordable prices. This contributes to a great link diversity. As I mentioned in my Fiverr SEO Test, these links aren’t going to help much, but they can definitely bury your competition in a mountain of data to sort though.

With 800 incoming links, it’s easy to see which links provide the most value, but when you show 8,000 links, how will your competition know which links are providing value, and which are a waste of time.  They won’t, and that’s how you protect your link profile.