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How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites

dejanseo.com.au

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

#81

Post by stef25 »

TekMol wrote: post #58
dejanseo wrote: post #54

Hi 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.

It's a POC with no intention other than seeing if it would be possible, isn't it?

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

#82

Post by snaky »

lukestevens wrote: post #2

This 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…

> noindex

So, the browser extension indicating (with big red fonts) that this site is noindex could be a simplest solution?

For not power users who don't know about any extensions that would be not so easy though. If that function will appear in Chrome enabled by default, that would raise questions about Google motives, obviously.

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

#83

Post by stef25 »

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…

Sorry, calling BS on this one. By simply copying a site you get flagged as having duplicate content.

Then there's DMCA. I've seen an e-commerce site's homepage get de-indexed, killing the business, due to 1 single image being used for which the site owner didn't have copyright.

SEO undoubtedly has many shady practises, but "professional SEO" is actually really difficult and involves much more than cloning competitor sites and somehow getting away with it.

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

#84

Post by tnolet »

dejanseo wrote: post #76
tnolet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yay, you misled users and stole content! Seems like you are actually proud of this. I gather you realize this and did this in the best “white hat” spirit, although that’s not really what I get from your blog.

Where did I say I'm proud of this? Everyone keeps saying "proud". I chose to share it in public because it's a serious problem that others may be using it to do real harm. I blog about many things, most harmless and often very useful. I remember one other time when I exposed something broken in Google. I got penalised as a reward.

You are right, you never used the word “proud”. You also did not use the words “problem” or “harm” in the post. So the “pride” thing is mostly tone, subtext or between the lines if you will. This is just my opinion so YMMV

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

#85

Post by laumars »

lukestevens wrote: post #2

This 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…

I'm curious how many visitors did this. In my very limited sample set of myself and friends / work colleagues, we all use middle click to open a result in a new tab.

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

#87

Post by azeirah »

wiether wrote: post #70
mrob wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.

In that case, just not using useless thing like "back" button will be perfectly fine. A good website don't need using this button. And to navigate between websites, using a tab for each website is fine. Especially when comparing results from Google.

... Don't use the back button? What? I actually kind of like the ability to move between pages and domains with the back button.

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

#88

Post by kentrado »

tnolet wrote: post #84
dejanseo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did I say I'm proud of this? Everyone keeps saying "proud". I chose to share it in public because it's a serious problem that others may be using it to do real harm. I blog about many things, most harmless and often very useful. I remember one other time when I exposed something broken in Google. I got penalised as a reward.

You are right, you never used the word “proud”. You also did not use the words “problem” or “harm” in the post. So the “pride” thing is mostly tone, subtext or between the lines if you will. This is just my opinion so YMMV

As long as it is subtext and tone you can claim anything regarding another person's character and they have no recourse to argue against you, because it is all in your mind.

Well done.

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

#89

Post by dejanseo »

stef25 wrote: post #81
TekMol wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying someone elses site and tricking their users to use your copy is a copyright violation and fraud. Nothing cool about it.

It's a POC with no intention other than seeing if it would be possible, isn't it?

Not the first time either. Every now and again I get an interesting idea, test it and share it with the world. The test that was left forgotten had no commercial impact on anyone and very low traffic.

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

#90

Post by p49k »

stef25 wrote: post #81
TekMol wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying someone elses site and tricking their users to use your copy is a copyright violation and fraud. Nothing cool about it.

It's a POC with no intention other than seeing if it would be possible, isn't it?

Except for the part where he said he moved the code to another site five years ago where it has been running since and even ranks highly for some search queries? Unless I’m misreading that paragraph.
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