We’ve all seen those websites that show up in the SERPs that are just there because the domain has been around for years and has managed to pick up a few links along the way. They’re listed in dmoz, PR 4 or 5, but the content is really old. What if there was a way to dig through the list of sites in your niche and find the few that been abandoned by their owners? Don’t you think a some of those owners would be willing to sell you their websites far below their true value? They are! You just need to find them.

Old, Authoritative, Ranking Websites Are Waiting For You

I built a tool that will help you find sites you can buy that are old and authoritative in your niche. There are websites in almost every niche that have built up authority over years but have been abandoned by their owners. These absentee owners are often happy to unload their old websites on you for very little. The trick is finding these hidden gems amongst all the active websites. You can spend hours going through directories and SERPs looking for websites that are abandoned or you can use the tool I built to find them quickly and automatically.

Sitefinder301 – Find A Killer Deal On An Old Website.

Sitefinder301 uses the dmoz Open Directory and the Internet Archive to find sites that are relevant to your niche that haven’t been updated in a long time. If you’re lucky you can find a great site with an owner that is willing to sell it for very little.

How It Works

You supply a dmoz category URL and Sitefinder301 examines all the sites that are in it and finds the ones that haven’t been updated in a long time. It gives you PageRank and Whois information on the sites so you can quickly determine if it’s worth buying and who to contact. It’s a quick and easy way to come up with a short list of acquisition targets out of hundreds of possible websites.

Enough Already Where’s The Goods?

Ok here it is, the product of late night php hacking:

Benefiting From Your Acquisition

Here’s a couple ideas for what to do with your new site:

• Put up new content and rank quickly for valuable terms. Build upon the old sites authority and create something of real value.
• Put up a page that promotes your product or service and funnels visitors to your current website.
• Redirect the old site to your current site and benefit from it’s authority and traffic.

Share And Share Alike

Sitefinder301 is open source. You can install it on your SEO tools website or hack it for your own purposes. Download the source here: /makebeta/sitefinder301/sitefinder301code.zip
All I ask is you pass some link friendship back my direction .

I will no longer be hosting Spyjax.

It’s been fun and very interesting, but it’s time to call it quits. Spyjax is just a side project but it’s eating up server power so I’ve decided to turn it off. I kicked around the idea of turning into a real service / business but I’m just not that interested in it.

Thank You For Commenting and Linking!

It’s been really fun reading everyone’s comments here and on all the blogs that wrote about Spyjax. There were some great discussions around privacy and ethics. Some of the best comments where on the SEO Book blog: Spy on Visitor Browsing History for Competitive Research.

Full Source Code Available

Because I’ve decided to shutdown the service I’m giving away all the code as open source. Anyone can install the Spyjax service on their server. Someone else could even start the service up and let others user it. You can download the source here: Spyjax Source Code.
Spyjax uses PHP and MySQL so most web servers should be able to run it. You’ll need to do a little bit of configuration, mainly in the config.php file. There might be a place or two where you need to put your email address for sign up and feedback emails to work correctly. Also the urls.php file needs your MySQL database host, user name, and password. The service assumes that it’s using a database named “spyjax”. The schema for the database can be found in spyjax.sql. If you have any questions about how to install it contact me using the form on over here.

4,808,202 URLs Were Found

While Spyjax was running it tracked 282,542 visitors and collected 4,802,202 URLs from their browser history. Here’s the top 50 URLs found by Spyjax:

1. http://www.google.com – 59927
2. http://www.yahoo.com – 45591
3. http://www.myspace.com – 29869
4. http://www.youtube.com – 27057
5. http://www.msn.com – 22045
6. http://www.hotmail.com – 16969
7. http://www.ebay.com – 16123
8. http://www.facebook.com – 13855
9. http://www.mapquest.com – 11689
10. http://www.cnn.com – 9285
11. http://www.weather.com – 8634
12. http://www.amazon.com – 7852
13. http://www.wikipedia.org – 7401
14. http://www.aol.com – 7381
15. http://www.imdb.com – 6023
16. http://www.walmart.com – 5826
17. http://www.gmail.com – 5740
18. http://www.apple.com – 5549
19. http://www.flickr.com – 5197
20. http://www.chase.com – 5053
21. http://www.ask.com – 4919
22. http://www.google.co.uk – 4876
23. http://www.bestbuy.com – 4682
24. http://www.usps.com – 4607
25. http://www.craigslist.org – 4555
26. http://www.download.com – 4474
27. http://www.digg.com – 4389
28. http://www.paypal.com – 4038
29. http://www.dell.com – 3944
30. http://www.bankofamerica.com – 3846
31. http://www.bbc.co.uk – 3798
32. http://www.southwest.com – 3753
33. http://www.adobe.com – 3704
34. http://www.comcast.net – 3657
35. http://www.t-mobile.com – 3636
36. http://www.yellowpages.com – 3584
37. http://www.monster.com – 3578
38. http://www.nytimes.com – 3556
39. http://www.live.com – 3550
40. http://www.hp.com – 472
41. http://www.orbitz.com – 3456
42. http://www.whitepages.com – 3339
43. http://www.microsoft.com – 3310
44. http://www.capitalone.com – 3251
45. http://www.ticketmaster.com – 3228
46. http://www.target.com – 3157
47. http://www.realtor.com – 3114
48. http://www.ebay.co.uk – 3064
49. http://www.kbb.com – 3036
50. http://www.blogger.com – 3031

If you’re like most web users, you assume that your browser history is private. For example if you visit an online store, you assume they can’t see if you’ve been looking at their competitor. Just a few weeks ago I assumed this was the case. Guess what?

Your browser history is not private!

In fact with a few well crafted lines of Javascript, websites can examine your browser history and record what pages you have been to. Keep reading and I’ll tell you exactly how it’s done and introduce you to a service that any webmaster can put on their site to see what pages their users have visited. I’ll also tell you exactly what type of information can be retrieved, and how you can protect yourself.

How JavaScript Can Be Used To Steal Your Browser History:

With CSS website designers can make links a different color if they have been visited by the user. For example this link should be colored differently than this other link. The first link you have been to before (it’s the page you are on right now) while the second link you have never visited (because it is fictitious). Now you’re thinking “but how can this be used to steal my history?”. Let’s dive a little deeper.

Javascript Can Examine The Color Of Your Links = Steal Your Browsing History

Javascript can examine the rendered state of an HTML document, called the DOM. One of the properties that is available through the DOM is the current CSS attributes of a node (nodes are HTML tags, one of which is the <a> or link tag).
All a website has to do to see what pages you’ve been to is place a list of links on the page and examine the color of those links. Ajax can be used to retrieve a list of links to test and also send the results back to the server without the user ever knowing.
The code to do this examination can be a little tricky due to cross browser issues. Here is a snippet of Javascript that can do the evaluation (based on the Hey you! Where have you been? blog post by Peter van der Graaf and script from Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Cabri):

<pre>function hasLinkBeenVisited(url) {
var link = document.createElement('a');
link.href = url;
document.body.appendChild(link);
if (link.currentStyle) {
var color = link.currentStyle.color;
if (color == '#ff0000')
return true;
return false;
} else {
link.setAttribute("href",url);
var computed_style = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle( link, null );
if (computed_style) {
if (computed_style.color == 'rgb(255, 0, 0)')
return true;
}
return false;
}
}</pre>
The code above assumes that CSS rules are making links that have been visited red (#ff0000) and new links a different color.

Ajax Can Be Used To Examine Thousands Of Links Dynamically

A clever web developer can use Ajax to dynamically load a list of links for each new visitor. A couple hundred links can be grabbed at a time and examined without slowing down the page noticeably. If you spend just a few seconds on a website thousands of URLs can be checked.

The Limitations

This technique does not allow sites to read your entire browser history. It only allows a site to test a predefined list of URLs to see if you have visited any of them. It’s like the card game “go fish”, you can’t see the players cards but you can ask them if they have any particular card. Most likely the way this technology would be used is to examine a list of competing URLs. This could give a website valuable information on who their competitors really are and what information on those sites is being looked at.

How To Stop People From Spying On Your Browser History

There are two sure fire ways to stop people from stealing your browser history.

1. The nuclear option is to disable JavaScript within your browser. In Firefox you’d just go to Tools -> Options -> Content tab and then uncheck “Enable JavaScript”. This method is very limiting because you probably enjoy all the JavaScript goodness on the web.
2. Limit your browser history. The less browser history you store the fewer URLs someone can steal from that history. In Firefox you can change the amount of browser history by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and then either uncheck the “Remember visited pages” checkbox or change the number of days that history is stored for.

UPDATE: Spyjax Has Been Turned Off

I will no longer be hosting Spyjax. It’s been fun and very interesting, but it’s time to call it quits. Read more here.

Introducing Spyjax

One Line Of JavaScript And You Can Start Spying

Ok, now that I’ve explained how this all works and how you can protect yourself, I want to introduce you to a small piece of code that I wrote that makes it super easy for you to spy on your website visitors. It’s called Spyjax and here’s how it works.

1. Sign Up For An Account

   All that’s required is your email address and a password of your choosing. I promise I will not send you any unwanted email or give your email address away to anyone else. Sign Up For Spyjax

2. Add URLs To Look For

   You can add custom URLs, the top 12 Google results for any search, or just look for the home page of the top 10,000 sites on the web.

3. Put One Line Of Code At The Bottom Of Your Pages

   A simple <script> tag will insert all the JavaScript needed to spy on your visitors as well as communicate with the Spyjax service to record the results.

4. Optionally Add A Spyjax Widget To Your Site

   If you just want to have some fun and show people that you’re spying on them you can put one of three Spyjax widgets on your website. There’s one on this site on the right sidebar.

Update: Spyjax Only Gives You Anonymous Data

There have been some concerns raised since I first published this article and released Spyjax. So I just wanted to point out that the service does not link specific websites with identifiable user data. It simply tells you things like 36% of your visitors have been to http://www.google.com/. Basically all the data collected by Spyjax is anonymous and shown in aggregate form. Obviously this same technology could be used to track specific user’s history, especially if you’re on a site that records your identity in some way. In my humble opinion it’s much better to debate these issues in the open than to have this sort of technology floating around without people knowing about it.

So You Just Want The Code?

Well I’m not greedy, so I’m giving it away for free. You can do anything you want with it, just don’t blame me if it breaks or gets you in trouble.

You can download the code here: Spyjax Code. It’s got an open source Attribution Assurance License attached to it.

Check out these services by my company MerchantOS:

• POS Software – A point of sale and inventory control system for small retailers.
• Bike Shop Point of Sale – A full POS solution specifically designed for independent bicycle retailers.