Raiding Your Competitor’s Web Site for Secret Information
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The pages you see on your competitor’s web site are just the pages they want you to see. Very often there is a lot of information on their site that they think you can’t find (and they wouldn’t want you to find), but you can find it. You’ll be surprised what you’ll learn about them…
Even more important than looking at your competitor’s site, you may want to try this trick out on your own site first as a way of making sure you don’t have information online that you wouldn’t want someone finding.
Here’s the trick–it’s nothing super fancy, but few people have ever thought to use it as a competitive analysis strategy:
Go to Google.com and enter “site:CompetitorSite.com”
“CompetitorSite.com” is, of course, your competitor’s site and the “site:” part tells Google to list all the pages they’ve ever found on that particular web site.
If your competitor’s don’t understand how to thwart the search engines, search engines may find all sorts of information on pages inside their site that they don’t realize have been made public.
While this little trick is useful for looking over your competitor’s site, it is also very useful for looking at your own web site. Is there any information the search engines have found that you don’t want available to the public? You’ll want to make sure those pages are deleted.
Or, are there pages on your site you WANT the search engines to find and index but they haven’t yet? You can get better exposure to those pages by, say, linking to them from your home page for a little while or getting other web sites to link directly to those pages.
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