How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
dejanseo.com.au
How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
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Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#2This 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 generate heatmaps, scrollmaps, records screen interactions and typing.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#3One more reason to kill the referer HTTP header, I guess.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#4This 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.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#5That’s genius
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#6This 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?
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#7Disturbing, 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.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#8One more reason to kill the referer HTTP header, I guess.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#9In many ways this is malicious deception. In any instance where a login form is included in the scraped mirror, that represents an attacked user, and a phishing attempt.
If someone did this in the wild, in an uncontrolled situation involving random strangers, it risks serious misinterpretation, and worse.
Re: How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
#10It 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.