Mind-Blowing Hack for Competitive Link Research

source:

Code:

http://dejanseo.com.au/mind-blowing-hack/

Last week I presented a method for search result hijacking. The story got much coverage in the SEO community, perhaps due to the fact that Rand Fishkin?s authority pages were also compromised as party of our experiment. One thing I did not elaborate on in the original article was the peculiar way Google Webmaster Tools handle document canonicalisation.

TL;DR

You can see somebody else?s links in your Google Webmaster Tools as if you were the authorised user of that site. The process involves creation of identical document copy and the results are visible in about two weeks.

In the following screenshot we see what Google calls ?an intermediate? link. An old link which points to our old domain 301′s to our new domain. Nothing unusual about this.

There are other instances of the ?intermediate link? in Google Webmaster Tools. One of them is related to document canonicalisation process described in a paper called ?Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications? by Daniel Peng and Frank Dabek. This is exactly the same process I used in the result hijack article and the most interesting thing is that it works in reverse! (I?ll get to that later).

Here?s an example of one such case, some of you may remember this website from my hijacking experiment:

As you can see the ?intermediate link? notification suggests that my page above receives a link from Rob?s website but the thing is, it doesn?t. So what?s going on?
Well, the page I created is a replica of the original page on http://www.marketbizz.nl/en/. Google has seen my duplicate version and ?merged? it so to speak. Now I not only see the links pointing to my own version but the aggregate list of links for the one canonical/merged document across all applicable domains.
I am seeing the same links the owner of that site would see in their Google Webmaster Tools.

Here?s the interesting part, it works in reverse! You don?t even have to hijack the result for this to work, you can see the results with the ?loser? URL. If you create a duplicate page with lower PageRank (not very difficult to do that is it?) of any page on the web, you will be able to see its links in your own Google Webmaster Tools.
To test this concept I copied a PDF from another site and simply got it indexed, in about ten days I saw all its backlinks in webmaster tools, here it is:

[TABLE="width: 254"]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD="width: 216"]Domains[/TD]
[TD="width: 38"]Links[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]doc-txt.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]38[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]documbase.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]19[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]pdfqueen.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]7[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]cmu.edu[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]6[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]msra.cn[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]6[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]quora.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]5[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]130.203.0.133[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]5[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]google.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]berbatek.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]podpdf.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]blogspot.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]seobythesea.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]writingseo.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]newyorklastminutetravel.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]automotivedigitalmarketing.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]123people.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]blumenthals.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]psu.edu[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]pitt.edu[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]65.54.0.113[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]52opencourse.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]chatmeter.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]journalogy.net[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]vebidoo.de[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]c4ads.org[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]ryanmcd.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]ebookbrowse.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]uic.edu[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]rightnow.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]osti.gov[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]informationweek.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]christopherpotts.net[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]sdsu.edu[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]keywordspy.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]psugeo.org[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]tagwalk.com[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="bgcolor: transparent"]
[TD]delib.net[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Now I can take any page/document from my competitor, place it on a domain of my choice, have it indexed and in a few weeks I?m able to see all their backlinks within Google Webmaster Tools.

It took me exactly 14 days to see the link data of Rob?s website.
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What do you guys think about this?

PD: I'm not the author of this article.

very cool bro

Very nice. Thanks for sharing!

it sounds pretty nice. This trick has been for a while now hehehe

wmoriarty said:

very cool bro

Click to expand...

cxim said:

Very nice. Thanks for sharing!

Click to expand...

we don't need more SPAM on BHW. Any decent thoughts regarding this article?

Little bit confused. Replica means copying the entire page with "title & meta"? How google assign the backlinks of that page to your replica page?

nice, thank you.

Read that last week, if this loophole sticks around it would be a neat way to uncover blog networks who's webmasters block Majestic and Ahref spiders. Buy a cheap domain install GWT and start copying the pages of your competitors, especially those that appear to be ranking with very few back links.