Can links be hidden?

[RobSchofield]

I was wondering if anyone can help me with some advice on agency work.

We have just employed a new SEO agency to conduct work on one of our websites. I took a look on OSE and GWT to see if we had any new links since the agency started working (1 month ago) but there's was nothing new.

When l asked for an update as to what link building efforts had been completed last month, l was told they don't give out a list of links as it could compromise the agencies techniques. They told me that they use software to hide links form link aggregators so that our competitors don't know what we are doing.

Can anybody confirm that such software exists or is this agency just taking us for a ride? If there is such a software, could this not hinder what links the search engines could see?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

[KeriMorgret]

Well, you can block crawlers in robots.txt, though that's certainly not a special software.

[LesleyPaone]

Such software does exist in a sense. There are automated SEO tools that can do this, like I said before, in a sense. What they do is primarily comment spam and forum spam. Some companies have their own link networks set up, and even others use sites that you can buy links on.

If I were you I would demand a list of links and if they did not give them to you I would RUN not walk away from them.

No tools is 100% accurate in finding all of the links created, if it were, they would branch it into a search engine. That being said, I give my clients a list of links that I built at the end of the month. Moz sometimes does not pick them up yet and it gives them something to click on and see I actually did my job, if it was link building I was doing. Some of the local citation sites are really not indexed quickly by Moz I have found, at the same time providing a link really removes any question of what I have done.

In the past links were a one way street, the more you had, the better off your site. Now things have changed.  Links are a two way street now, I would almost relate it to negative link juice.

The short and sweet of it is, I would get a list from them, and if they do not give a list I would can them.

[KeriMorgret]

I think the OP is asking about software that hides the links from places like OSE and Majestic, rather than software that creates links.

[KeriMorgret]

One thing to do would be to look in your analytics software for traffic coming from referring sites

Traffic from sites you haven't seen before? Might be your link builders, and in that case you can check out the links.

No traffic? Then you can ask why the sites with links weren't relevant enough to get any traffic.

Legit agencies won't hide what links the help you earn.

[KeriMorgret]

You might also do a google search, limiting it to the last month, for your business name or keyphrases you've asked them to build, and see what that may turn up on sites.

[LesleyPaone]

Still, I think the same thing rings true. You can totally hide links from OSE, Majestic, and Hrefs if you want. There are really only two ways to do it though, you either own the link network where you are posting the links, or the link network is expressly for this purpose and they make it known that they hide from these tools. (Make it known as in the sense of people that are buying the links)

There was a site that kept emailing me a while back, I cannot think of the name of it for the life of me, but they basically sold links on PR ranked sites. I bit and I looked into it, just to expand my knowledge on the area, but it was like $6-12 for a pr1 page and like $30-45 for a pr 4 page. I am pretty sure they went up to pr 7 or 8 for like 600 or 800 a month. But one thing they did have somewhere on their site was that they hid rogerbot and what ever bots the other guys use. Actually I think the only bot they allowed was google bot. It was stuck somewhere in their terms, I did a fake account sign up like I wanted to sell links on pages, just to see what it was about.

[irvingw]

If you are paying a company to build links for you, and they refuse to show you the links they have built I would be very weary. Tell them you can't pay them if you cannot see that the work has been completed.