One of the biggest issues you have in online marketing is the information which is exposed to your competition. And one of those areas is your links. After all, youre taught by many, including me, to run a backlink check on your competitors and follow in their footsteps. After all, why make things harder on yourself, just follow their path and it is essentially a shortcut.

But what can you do in order to protect yourself? I discovered this on accident last month, and Ive done it a couple dozen sites and theyre now protected.

Heres how it works:

1) Dont worry about Google. If a site showed 9,000 links in Webmaster Tools, a Google link: command will often show less than 500. Its just what they do. So, basically, your link profile is pretty safe with Google because they hardly show anything.

2) Natural Protection. Search engines will show a maximum of 1,000 results. So, if you have 20,000 links, Google and Yahoo! will show the max of 1,000.

3) Paid links are NOT penalized. If they are discovered, the paid links just arent counted – but your site is NEVER penalized as long as you have a good link profile. Basically, if your PageRank is a 4 or better, youre in great shape.

Okay, with that out of the way, lets discuss how to hide your profile. My discovery happened when I got upset at Brad Callen, who created SEO Elite, because his software was only picked up about 8 unique domains when I did a link check with his software. Turned out his software was working just fine. The problem was, I had advertised on two major blogs and was placed on their Blog Roll. Because of this, my link was on every single page of their Blog, and since it was a major Blog, Yahoo! put all the links at the top of the list.

This site I am referencing had over 30,000 links in Yahoo!, but only showed 8 unique domains in the top 1,000 results because these two blogs completely saturated the results. In other words, the real juicy links I have acquired over the years have been pushed down past the top 1,000 results – thus, they dont show to competitors.

Pretty cool, right?

Here is the best part. The ads on the blogs are bringing is great referral traffic and I suffered ZERO drop in ranking – but I didnt go up either. So, basically, the advertising did nothing positive or negative as far as ranking in the SERPs, but I have an increase in referral traffic and my really good links are now protected.

Do yourself a favor, run an SEO Elite report on your site. Make sure the Unique Domains option is checked and run it for Yahoo!. And see how many unique domains come up. If more than 50 come up, you might want to put this into practice.

And how do you find Blogs to advertise on? Thats easy. Just do a search in Googles Blog Search for your niche or market. Then do a site: command to see how many pages they have in Googles index. I prefer Blogs with 10,000 or more indexed pages. That way, all you need are about two ads and youre covered.

But dont make the mistake to target keyword phrases with your Blog Roll ad as that is NOT your purpose here. Use your company name or website name even your personal name. You dont want this to look like you are trying to game the system. Remember why you are doing this to clog up the link results so your competitors have no clue how you are ranking as well as you are.