Earlier quoted context omitted.
You bought a TLD when learning web development? That seems extreme.
This must be sarcasm.
This is certainly sarcasm.
How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
51–60 of 329 posts
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#52This is an interesting yet disturbing case of blackhat SEO and phishing, where the site owner hijacks the back button and sends visitors to fake sites where he can observe their behaviour. FTA: Here’s what I did: 1. User lands on my page (referrer: google) 2. When they hit “back” button in Chrome, JS sends them to my copy of SERP 3. Click on any competitor takes them to my mirror of competitor’s site (noindex) 4. Now…
Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.
I wish... even GitHub won't work properly without JavaScript enabled these days.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#531 Years years ago when I was learning web development I bought a TLD and just copy-pasted Amazon’s log in page to just check how it works. Amazon somehow found out about this and Google punished that TLD after that incident and it just couldn’t go up in rankings after that. If I remember correctly they had even put that TLD on sites that report/list “phishing” sites so if you Googled about that TLD you would also get…
You meant domain name, not TLD, right?
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#54Hi everyone! I did this. It was just a random cool idea I wanted to try. It worked a little too well and I quickly moved it to a disposable site to test if the page will get penalised by Google. I got busy with other things and forgot about it. When I bumped into it again I decided to write about it, for two reasons: 1) To me it's hard to believe that Chrome would allow for this to happen in the first place and 2) that Google wouldn't penalise a site doing this. Well, since the story was published Google tracked down my test page (most likely by using the source code I revealed on my blog) and completely de-indexed the whole domain.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#55Earlier 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"
The thing that concerns me is it's easy to wrap a JS API or unreference it if I know it's abused for ads/tracking. I don't know of good ways to go about tracking based on pointer events or scrolling.
I'd put more research into generating fake events or limiting them for an untrusted site, so mouse behavior can't be used for "where are they looking" analysis.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "…
> assumes most of the modern web is worth using
But it is, are you really going to ignore reading some huge breakthrough in physics because the site uses react? Also in many situations there's absolutely no other choice. Government sites, e-stores, banking.
And then there's the buildup of recorded urls. Private browsing is somewhat less useful when your scipt blocker whitelist is full of porn sites.
I use it for security in specific browsers but happily admit it's not an actual solution for normal people. Adding another 3 clicks, then another 2 for the inline JavaScript contained within after reload makes the internet incredibly annoying to use.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#57This seems to have some fairly scary security implications if used maliciously, but I can't think of a good way to protect against this. Does anyone know of a browser extension to limit access to the history API?
I started using NoScript a while back, just to see what the web is like without Javascript. My plan was to uninstall it when it got too annoying, but to my surprise it's actually not bad at all. I'm quite lax in whitelisting domains I actually trust, but even then it's nice that it doesn't load Javascript from all other umpteen domains, which is often the case.
Of course it's a very blunt weapon for blocking abuse like what's described in this blog post, but for sure it works.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#58Hi everyone! I did this. It was just a random cool idea I wanted to try. It worked a little too well and I quickly moved it to a disposable site to test if the page will get penalised by Google. I got busy with other things and forgot about it. When I bumped into it again I decided to write about it, for two reasons: 1) To me it's hard to believe that Chrome would allow for this to happen in the first place and 2) th…
Copying someone elses site and tricking their users to use your copy is a copyright violation and fraud. Nothing cool about it.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#59Honestly, it doesn't shock me in the slightest that someone who markets themselves as an SEO expert would not only do something as unethical as this, but also brag about it, as though they think they've done something they should be proud of.
FWIW, Dan (the author) has an outstanding reputation for professionalism and integrity in the marketing world. If he says he did something for ethical reasons, to those who know him, he's earned the benefit to be believed. (If you don't know him, you'd be forgiven for being suspicious) And credit should be given to him for educating everyone on this exploit.
Thank you Cyrus. I thought it would be obvious that this isn't a practical tactic a reputable brand could risk doing.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.
I wish... even GitHub won't work properly without JavaScript enabled these days.
Completely disabling Javascript isn't feasible, but you can use uMatrix or NoScript with all scripts blocked by default, and only whitelist ones on sites/domains that you trust.