how to spy on competitors?

[joe1275]

Can anyone give some tips about spying on competitors? are there softwares? free spying services? What I mean by spying is knowing things like where their visitors are coming from, when their pages get updated,...
Thanks

[TWTCommish]

I don't recommend spying on your competitors that way...I can't think of any ETHICAL way of finding out where their visitors are coming from with any high amount of reliability.

As for their updated pages...Internet Explorer allows you to bookmark pages and receive notification when a certain page is updated...give that a try.

Overall if you want the upper hand, then just offer more content.




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Chris Bowyer
MyCoding.com: Join our mailing list for launch notification!
"I'm not an insomniac, I'm a web designer."

[qslack]

Admittedly this is quite unethical, but:

Visit their site and if they're on a domain try the following URLs. Hopefully one of them will get you to one of their stats pages.

domain.com/stats
domain.com/logs
domain.com/analog
stats.domain.com
stats.domain.com:2000
stats.domain.com:4000
stats.domain.com:8000
logs.domain.com:2000
logs.domain.com:4000
logs.domain.com:8000

However some people have their logs PW-protected. http://fourthdev.com/logs

DISCLAIMER I do NOT recommend doing any of these, as they are extremely unethical!! I meant these to expand your knowledge, not to uncover trade secrets or the like...

[Hierophant]

My stats are double password protected. First you need a password to get into the port then a second password to get into the stats.

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Wayne Luke - Sitepoint Moderator/Internet Media Developer
Digital Magician Studios - Making Magic with Web Applications
wluke@digitalmagician.com

[robharford]

OK I'm not into *stats stealing*, but one of THE most useful resources for competitive intelligence can be found here:

http//www.spyonit.com

They notify you by email when a website changes.

They will tell you if your name or a competitors name appears in a newsgroup.

You can even be notified when someone posts a message from a specific email address.

You can be notified when a specific keyword appears in news headlines.

Well...do I need to go on. Check it out. A superb resource! I use it every single day.

Hint: Own your own ezine? Want up-to-date news articles etc. Use Spyonit!

Boy I wish I was paid for recommending this company :-)
Best

Rob
Freedom * Wealth * Privacy * Security http://www.dangerousbooks.com/

[Aidan Bahta]

To me, it doesnt make sense why everyone is so afraid of others looking at their stats. Are we all embarrassed? If it was a decent site, then it would seem more like they would brag about the stats instead of hide them from all.

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Aidan Bahta
abahta@flashmail.com

ActiveWM.com - The place for the Active Webmaster.

ICQ: 71801904
AIM: trc810
MSN IM: activewm

[qslack]

It might show say 10.160.31.2 (my IP) visiting /admin/login.php with POST data user=jimbo&password=iSn4jDj4j2F9 and well, then, let's just say it'd be bad.

[Aidan Bahta]

Very true.

How many sites have passwords inside of the URL anyway? Not too many. They should be the ones worried about spying on logs, but what about the rest of the web?

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Aidan Bahta
abahta@flashmail.com

ActiveWM.com - The place for the Active Webmaster.

[qslack]

POST data is actually the data that is not in the querystring. It's in the STDIN input stream...that basically means it's included with the request but the requested URL is login.php.

[Aidan Bahta]

Hmmm...I'll have to take your word on that one

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Aidan Bahta
abahta@flashmail.com

ActiveWM.com - The place for the Active Webmaster.

[SubmissoR]

You could type in the competitor's domain into linkpopularity.com to see who is linking to them......

Or you could just type in the domain name into a search engine to see what kind of doorway-pages they have indexed...(spidering search engines only)