This test is quite an unusual link building technique. When you are editing a WordPress page, you may have noticed that the page has an admin URL that is displayed when you hover over the edit link in the admin dashboard. We started to wonder if you could build links to that URL, in order to obfuscate your link building from your competitors since it is possible that the link wouldn’t show in link checking tools.
Even if the link show up in the tools, it is possible that the tools would just show the page number and not the actual page. This is the primary reason for this test, if it can be a hack to build links to a page and pass through juice, without competitors figuring out what the link is.
For this test, five identical pages were set up. Once the pages have indexed, 500 links were built to the admin URL of the #2 ranking page. If this was indeed a hack and building links to the admin url works, there should be some movement, same as when we fire links to the regular page URL.
Results
Unfortunately, there was no movement for this test. The 500 links should have caused some movements however, the #2 page remained in the same position. This tells us that this is not a hack and building links to the admin URL has no effect.
Clint’s Feedback
Clint went through this particular test and provided his insights on it. Check out his video below.
Test number 38 – what happens if you build a backlink to your wp-admin, WordPress admin url?
When you’re a link builder and you’re trying to find some edges and stuff, and you want to look in places that other people won’t necessarily be building links to, because if you’re following the trends and chasing trends, like a lot of people, you end up getting caught up in the fixes for those trends.
For example, YouTube Live used to rank well, but people started making the software and instead of leveraging it for common sense and making money. People would put, 10 to 1500s of videos out on YouTube Live that is, in truth just absolutely had no chance of converting for lead, you weren’t gonna get any traffic out of it, you’re just doing it to leverage your software.
You want to do that way, especially with your link building, you look in different places and see where you can link to that other people necessarily wouldn’t do that. And as much as you can find, I won’t say loopholes or tips or tricks, but the abnormal that most people won’t look and people can’t reverse engineer what you’re doing.
And one of those ideas was to link to the WP admin URL. Now, if you don’t know that it is just we have WordPress and you log into WordPress, there’s a WP admin, or a WP login URLs and they don’t really go anywhere, they just have the login screen unless you customize them. And if you customize them, you could actually put URLs to like your homepage or something, which may be an interesting test to try out.
But they don’t redirect anywhere and if you change the URL to log in somewhere else, then you could actually break WordPress. But there are some systems where you can pick a custom thing and so instead of having WP admin, you use a different URL, and it’ll kind of sort of figure that stuff out. Ultimately, the WP login one is always there.
Anyway, so a set of 500 links to our admin url and absolutely zero, nothing happened. And again, I think that kind of goes along the lines of there’s no links on there, and there’s no redirect. So the juice is probably there on the admin URL, but it’s not going to move a test page one bit. I think there may be an opportunity there, if you have links to other pages inside of your wp-admin – hey sorry, if you’re not a member of this, then just check out our content at these pages or whatever, or at this page or this landing pages, etc. You probably might see a benefit for that. So this is certainly something we’re going to retest and then see what happens. It’ll be an interesting test for sure. And I’m pretty sure no one else tried it. So let’s see what’s going on with it.
Did that quack disappoint you and on the lookout for other SEO hacks? Check out our other articles and test for tested hacks that would get you to the top.