How to steal your competitors Google traffic

Don’t you want a cut of your competitors search engine traffic? Remember SEO isn’t just about ranks, it’s really about who gets the traffic!

Now imagine that people searching in Google couldn’t click through to your competitors website if they use Firefox… Sweet, right? You can make it happen!

The issue with Googlebot

So what is this all about. Well, it seems like Googlebot has forgotten which characters are allowed in a valid domain. The crawlers are indexing subdomains with invalid characters. Subdomains which are not accessible through all browsers.

In this case the issue is spaces in subdomains, e.g. http://%20www.cyberinet.com/ but it probably applies to most characters beyond az-09.

I recently discovered that one of my sites suddenly had about twice as many pages in Google according to their result count. After some quick digging I found that they had indexed my website twice just under two different subdomains. One being the regular ‘www’ and the other being ‘%20www’.

In my believing this wouldn’t work for all browsers, so I quickly checked it from Firefox 1.5, IE 6.0 and Opera 8.02. The result:

• Firefox “couldn’t find the server”
• IE didn’t mind and displayed the page
• Opera removed the space and displayed the correct page

There are many browsers and versions so it’s hard to say how many internet users this could affect. At least it affects some firefox users like me.

Another thing to note is that this will not work with all websites since it depends on how their DNS is set and how web servers handle the domain requests. Mainly this is when both is set with a * alias.

Here are some examples before I tell you how to mess with your competitors click throughs from Google searches.

• Google search: Minnesota Legal Assistant College Courses
• Google search: 1 khmer band

You can find plenty of more examples by using the allinurl command at Google. You can try different variations - also with other characters than the space.

How to abuse it and steal search traffic

So my theory was that this could be abused just by linking heavily to the invalid subdomain.

First check that it will work on your competitors website. Use IE 6.0 or another browser which will show the page even though the URL is invalid. Enter their URL - including ‘http://’ - and put a space before or in the subdomain. If the page shows up then you’re ready to go.

If it works then all you need to do is make a decent amount of links (at best some “trusted” links) point to your competitors URL, but with a space in the subdomain. Be aware that websites using relative links is probably easier to use this technique on since you can link to surrounding pages - also with the “wrong” subdomain - and thereby “create” internal pages linking to the target page. When you’ve feeded more link juice to the invalid URL, than they get on the real corresponding page, you’d probably see that you succeeded.

Now when the next firefox user clicks on your competitor they’ll be told that firefox couldn’t find the server. And it would take sharp eyes and knowledge to notice that the URL is invalid. So they’ll go back to the SERPs and if you’re listed on the same page as your competitor, then by using this technique to decrease the amount of click throughs to their website, you’ll be able to increase traffic to your own website. Congrats on your black hat seo achievement!

It does work but should you do it?

I tried it on an old domain of mine ‘cyberinet.com’ and it worked - but only for a couple of days which was probably because I only made three links to it..!

This is not an endorsement to use this technique it is more like a proof of concept! Also consider if there’s legal issues by doing this. But it’s all up to you - as shoemoney recently said: “Sometimes You Have To Be Evil To Be Good” though I’m not sure that he’d use this technique.

Then again it’s really a Google / FireFox problem so why should you care?