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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

#111

Post by Quarrelsome »

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.

but if you don't care so much about those things it is kinda interesting.

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

#113

Post by tralarpa »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #106
tralarpa wrote: post #98

This is really a good example why it is so difficult for security experts to do research and experiments where real users are involved. What Mr. Petrovic did is illegal in most developed countries: copyright violation (copying web pages) and monitoring and storing user behavior without their consent (and, even worse, by phishing). It doesn't matter that he did it for a "very brief period of time (for ethical reasons)…

When you do security work, that's an important part of your job. Sure, in many scenarios like traditional pentesting you can probably do fine within the legal boundaries in most jurisdictions, but as soon as you do serious security research when you actually test your ideas in practice, you're likely to cross the line sooner or later. It's a difference between "it should probably work" and "yes, it worked, I tried it…

> you're likely to cross the line sooner or later.

That's basically the opposite of what security researchers working for companies and research institutes are doing. Document everything, get written consent of involved parties and sometimes even inform the police about a planned action. Make sure that you (a) don't cross the line or (b) move the line legally further away.

Of course, there are security experts who don't care about that. But they usually don't publish their results on a website with their real name.

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

#114

Post by adtac »

ummonk wrote: post #53
everydaypanos wrote: post #41

1 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?

Uhh no, I created a country and ICANN assigned me a two-letter TLD. Was this not a part of your webdev bootcamp?

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

#115

Post by oblio »

laumars wrote: post #85
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.

The vast majority of regular users I've seen go back and forth between search and search results. Heck, I do it from time to time. Most users are extremely "inefficient" by geek standards.

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

#117

Post by treerock »

rkangel wrote: post #107
stef25 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While that might mean that it's OK ethically (I'm not sure either way), that doesn't make a difference legally. If you go and pick the lock of a random house in your city and get caught by the police, I very much doubt that the defence "I was just doing it to see if I could" is going to help you.

If you didn't steal anything, what would the charge be?

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

#119

Post by nmstoker »

What's concerning is that the post author seems not to see the problem with trying to sit on both sides of the fence at once.

As others have said, the way this was done is likely to be against numerous laws in most major jurisdictions. If you wish to do this as a PoC then simply put a notice up on the page that initiates it and use dummy "competitor" content, so you've got some semblance of user content/transparency without copyright infringement. That would work just as well for flagging it up as a concern to others.

Or if being up-front about it is not the side you are on, do this fully admitting that it's wrong and face any consequences (it doesn't sound like this was the post authors aim, esp given follow up comments).

For a "very brief period of time" doesn't cut the mustard here, just as it wouldn't with briefly stealing something from a bank or briefly kidnapping someone (both crimes where one could sometimes argue there may not be permanent damage, although even that likely isn't true in many cases)

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

#120

Post by dorgo »

stef25 wrote: post #101
dorgo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"duplicate content" is a problem for both, the original site and the copycat. But the copycat doesn't rely on SEO in this example. It just buys traffic in AdWords. So the duplicate content penalty would harm only the original site.

Google must surely be able to tell the difference between the original site and copying site because of timestamps. How would an Adwords campaign change that?

Maybe Google can tell the difference, but, as I did SEO some years ago, we didn't relyed on it. Duplicate content was considered a problem regardless of who published first.

Duplicate content is a problem for organic rankings. In payed search it may be a problem for the quality factor (not sure). But even if it impacts the quality factor you just have to pay more to achieve the same result.

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