Until now, I’ve kept these tips & tricks under my hat, because they weren’t widely known. It’s easy to get an insight into a popular Sitesell website with these simple tips, and what’s best is that the information is all public!

How to Discover Almost Any SBI-site’s Secrets, otherwise known as how to hack a Sitesell site (not that anyone cares anymore!). I’ll assume that you have a website set up (any one), and that you have your eyes on a keyword or niche already. If not, then perhaps you already know an SBI site… They’re easy to find, once you know what patterns to use.

1. Open the source code to find the keywords in the HTML. Look for the keyword in the index.html… or choose a keyword that you think should have SBI sites. Example: kids parties.

2. Join Sitesell’s own brandname Link Exchange Service, and when you register use the keywords. Gradually, over the next few weeks or months, you’ll find that your site is matched with many sites that have also registered, because of your choice of keyword.

Once you have enough data, look for sites that use /index.html as the main page (this is likely an SBI-site).

Visit the site and determine if it is. You may need no more than an overview of the first page… or you may need to do a WHOIS search (easy enough) to check if the DNS servers are linked to Sitesell.

3. Once you have determined your shortlist, visit each site. Then add the text ‘urllist.txt’ after the URL (thus, mysbisite.com/urllist.txt). This will output a fairly complete list of ALL the pages on that site. Since each url includes the filename.html, you will have a complete list of the primary keywords that builds each site.

Copy the entire list into a text writer (like Notepad+), then using copy+replace remove the code from each URL, thus: *http://www.mysbisite.com/*.html

and finally copy and replace each ‘-’ with a space.

Admittedly, if you have filenames that are long… these may or may not include keywords that are relevant. However, most keywords used as filenames are three words or shorter.

So, copy the list into Excel, and sort by number of words in each line. Voila! You now have your future competitor’s entire current keyword list, probably ending at three or four keyword length.

Repeat and rinse until you have a fairly complete overview of all your SBI’s competitors’ keywords, size of their sites, etc. (You can also do this with their sitemaps).

4. No longer want to work on the web or need deeper analysis? You can simply ‘rip’ their SBI site to your own hard-drive using HTTrack, giving you the opportunity to study the site in more depth.

While you cannot reuse their words, data, etc … and you wouldn’t want to be sued… you can spend a lot of time studying the successful sites’ structure (T2-T3 via the right menu… you can determine the T2s straight away), page design, content, … etc.

It’s all their for you to see, right in front of your eyes. And with gently more sophisticated tools, by searching for the ‘Return to xxx’ in the data, you can determine the list of T3s for each page fairly quickly, too.

5. There are so many services now out there that can help you determine a site rankings, traffic, etc… just plug the URL directly into your favorite tools, you’ll find a lot more intelligence on those sites, including recent performance, rankings, social standing, etc. By plugging the keywords into your favorite keyword tools, you will also find out what keywords are profitable and what are not.

So, I’m saying these things because they can be done, are technically not difficult to do, and unfortunately enabled (indirectly) by SBI’s poor over all design. By outing the best performing sites, SBI just makes the list of competitors ever longer, violates the entrepreneur’s trust, and creates a dog-eat-dog environment of exploitative confrontation, not cooperation.

Hack Sitesell Sites to get the Skinny

That’s the skinny on your SBI competitor site. All from publicly available information, nothing hacked at all. All right in front of your eyes. And I actually fail to see how this is ‘black hat’! All of the information is published and accessible via your own Browser!