Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The first thing you're going to want to look at are the backlinks. This will show you if there are other websites where your competitor is advertising or where it's receiving free traffic.
Also, many websites have public website stats available (whether they know it or not). Search the source code of the website and look for a tracking script, then try to login to the webstats program with the username from the competitor's source code. Several free traffic stat programs don't require passwords if you get the username from the source. The traffic stats will probably offer a wealth of information regarding your interests including referral information.
You could also check out the Alexa Rankings for your competitors site. I don't really trust the Alexa numbers, and it won't show you exactly where your competitor's traffic is coming from, but it may give you some idea of how much traffic they're receiving, and where else your competitor's visitors may be going.
Lastly, take a look at the pay per click engines, and see if your competitor is advertising there. Overture, Google, Findwhat, etc. If your client is paying for per click advertising, then you can be certain they're receiving some traffic from the engines.
Users often enter a companys name or url into search engines, as oppossed to entering it direct into their browsers address bar. Therefore these tools actually contain a good indication of site popularity.
Enter <YourCompany> into the Overture keyword tool and you will see how many users searched for your site. Do the same with your competitors site (make sure you enter all possible misspellings of company names). This will give you a good indication of how competitors traffic compares to the traffic on your site.
Check out alexa and interperit the results with a pinch of salt. I use it every now and then for this purpose.
menton
Check not only /stats but directories in which stats packages usually live. Once you have compiled that list, one could quickly write a script to see if a stats package is installed and results publicly available on a target site.
domain.com/stats
domain.com/sitestats
domain.com/log
domain.com/weblog
etc etc
Just take a wild guess. You get pretty good at it.
Also if you link to the other site you often find their stats page in your own logs (they click on you to see where the link came from). That can yield a lot of useful info.
Always amazes me how some people have not password protected their stats.
Theres gold in them thar hills......
TJ
People, you really should check to see that your statistics are secure from snoopers.
