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.
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How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
11–20 of 329 posts
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#12I'm surprised he's willing to put his real name to this. I can't immediately see that it's actually illegal, but it still screams red flag for unethical behavior.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#13This is easy to hate on, and certainly ethically dubious....but man do I love it.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#14Why do browsers allow changing the back button history before the visitor arrived at the domain? Seems like a subtle cross origin attack if that is truly what's happening.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#15Why do browsers allow changing the back button history before the visitor arrived at the domain? Seems like a subtle cross origin attack if that is truly what's happening.
I can imagine you could work around that issue just by once redirecting onto your own site first.
On the surface, sounds like a difficult problem to solve safely. On a related note, I often have the back button not work because I hit back and chrome cached a redirect to some other page and it immediately redirects again before i can even spam back again. Need to long press back to get a longer history to go back further.
This is a really interesting "attack" to see.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#16Why do browsers allow changing the back button history before the visitor arrived at the domain? Seems like a subtle cross origin attack if that is truly what's happening.
I can imagine you could work around that issue just by once redirecting onto your own site first. On the surface, sounds like a difficult problem to solve safely. On a related note, I often have the back button not work because I hit back and chrome cached a redirect to some other page and it immediately redirects again before i can even spam back again. Need to long press back to get a longer history to go back furt…
This is interesting knowledge: https://smerity.com/articles/2013/where_did_all_the_http_ref...
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#17This is easy to hate on, and certainly ethically dubious....but man do I love it.
My thoughts exactly. This guy is an asshole, but man do I love a clever hack.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#18Honestly, 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.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#19Disturbing, fascinating, obvious in hindsight. Here’s another angle: a “bounce” back to google too quick is a negative ranking signal. By keeping them from going back to google by making them think they in fact did makes this also black hat seo.
But Google doesn't see the bounce back. The site bounces back to a copy of Google's result page.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#20Honestly, 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.