How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites • Hacker News Board

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#31

Post by jeswin » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

A couple of years back I was talking to someone who did SEO for a popular education network. The company was spending millions of dollars every month on SEO and advertising.

Their module operandi went like this:

1. Offer money to license or buy a smaller competitor's content

2. If that doesn't work, crawl and clone the site

3. Pump a lot of money into Google Ads, so that the cloned site now appears as an ad above the legitimate site. Google makes such scam easier now by making the ads look like organic results - a non technical user would hardly notice.

4. The legitimate site just dies.

I was asked to build a tool which crawls sites, which I refused. But I learned how professional SEO works.

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#32

Post by 3eto » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

> Record actual sessions (mouse movement, clicks, typing)

> I gasped when I realised I can actually capture all form submissions and send them to my own email.

How many bad actors have been doing the same and for how long? This doesn't sound like something Google should just brush under the carpet and expect no one else is doing it. Although I wish the author had reached out to Google first to see how they would have handled it, I thank him for publishing it.

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#33

Post by graeme » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 5:54 AM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #31

A couple of years back I was talking to someone who did SEO for a popular education network. The company was spending millions of dollars every month on SEO and advertising. Their module operandi went like this: 1. Offer money to license or buy a smaller competitor's content 2. If that doesn't work, crawl and clone the site 3. Pump a lot of money into Google Ads, so that the cloned site now appears as an ad above the…

This is somewhat risky, no? It's a clear case of copyright theft, and would be trivial to sue unless they hit everything behind cutouts to the extent they weren't traceable.

One would think the owner of the cloned site would notice lower traffic, search, and notice the ad scam. This strategy sounds like it would take months to execute before the competing site died, if not longer.

Am I missing something? I've read lots of seo scams that seem very hard to undo. This one seems....slow, very avoidable, with large legal and reputational risks for the perpetrator.

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#34

Post by digitalboss » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 5:56 AM UTC

Update from site "Google’s team has tracked down my test site, most likely using the source code I shared and de-indexed the whole domain."

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#35

Post by LeoPanthera » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:00 AM UTC

confiscate wrote: post #28

mrob wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.

really? That seems extreme. Might as well say: "Yet another reason to not browse anything on the web"

It's a shame you're being downvoted, you're entirely correct.

Most of the modern web is unusable with javascript disabled.

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#36

Post by gear54rus » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:02 AM UTC

confiscate wrote: post #28

mrob wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.

really? That seems extreme. Might as well say: "Yet another reason to not browse anything on the web"

Lol. Downvoted for pointing out fanaticism. Why don't you guys remove all executables from your PCs too? Shouldn't PCs be just a glorified typing machine?

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#37

Post by Nadya » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #35

confiscate wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? That seems extreme. Might as well say: "Yet another reason to not browse anything on the web"

It's a shame you're being downvoted, you're entirely correct. Most of the modern web is unusable with javascript disabled.

>Most of the modern web is unusable with javascript disabled

This isn't wrong - but it assumes most of the modern web is worth using. Most of the modern web isn't worth browsing, and every site I've ever come across that is worth reading works just fine without Javascript. I'll continue to browse the internet with Javascript disabled-by-default. It's a surprisingly good filter.

With that being said - while this is "another reason" it is as minor of a reason as it gets...

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#38

Post by kristianp » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

aquarin wrote: post #10

It seems my habbit to open google links in new tabs with right click have more meaning now. I initialy used this to avoid referal information.

That's not going to stop the referrer from being available to the page. In chrome hit F12 and in the console type

    document.referrer.

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#39

Post by iKevinShah » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #31

A couple of years back I was talking to someone who did SEO for a popular education network. The company was spending millions of dollars every month on SEO and advertising. Their module operandi went like this: 1. Offer money to license or buy a smaller competitor's content 2. If that doesn't work, crawl and clone the site 3. Pump a lot of money into Google Ads, so that the cloned site now appears as an ad above the…

This is on the same level (IMO) like when Site A pays SEO company to make SITE B appear as SPAM (usually by spamming SITE B's links on commenting systems with some vague texts).

Had read this on discussion forums a lot when "Scrapebox" and the likes were used (2010-12ish)

Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

#40

Post by jackgolding » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

I've seen Dejan speak and I'd recommend following his work because he does very interesting black hat things like this in SEO. He has so many out of the box ideas like this which are brilliant.