In general, a hidden backlink is a backlink which is invisible to third party crawlers of backlink monitoring services like ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, SEMrush and Sistrix etc. but not to search engine crawlers such as Googlebot. A hidden backlink passes link juice like any other backlink because Google does not see the difference. We just named them hidden backlinks.
Search engines like Google use a large set of factors to determine a website’s SERP ranking. A lot of important factors are based on external inbound links called backlinks. To put it simply, each backlink a search engine crawler crawls is included in the calculation of a website’s SERP position. Therefore, to be able to find out why a website has a specific SERP position, the key is to replicate the backlink profile generated by the search engine crawler. Since search engine providers like Google do not disclose crawl data to the public, third party backlink checkers and monitoring services established. They try to crawl the internet as exhaustively as the Google crawler does in order to provide accurate off-page SEO data to their customers.
The accuracy provided by backlink checkers declined by a good margin in the past 10 years. The reason is Black Hat SEO which is a category for very effective SEO methods that violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. PBNs are artificially created websites with the sole purpose to increase the SERP rankings of a target profit generating website. Often a PBN is owned and controlled by the same entity as the profit generating website. That allows the Black Hat SEO to adjust the robots.txt disallow entries, .htaccess rules or even the server-side code in such a way that third party crawlers will not find outbound links of all websites of the PBN. This prevents the SEO competition of that Black Hat SEO to analyze those PBN backlinks with common backlink checkers like those mentioned above. That SEO competition could be you! To fix that, include Linxact Explorer in your SEO tooling by subscribing to one of our insightful subscriptions today!