Stop Competitors from Stalking Your Website Using AdWords

Regular readers will know that I like to gaze at my log files in search of life-changing inspirational moments. Well I have another such gem of an inspiration for you: figuring out if someone is stalking your website using the Google AdWords keyword tool and how to stop them.

When someone goes to the AdWords keyword tool and asks for keywords based on the contents of a web page (the "Website content" option), Google actually requests the page live. This request shows up in the logs and can of course be blocked. The details are:

So what to do? Be careful blocking the IP addresses as a general precaution against stopping legitimate requests from Google IP addresses (Googlebot, Google’s Feedfetcher, etc). However, the user agent is a good tell-tale sign and is ripe for blocking.

So: aim… fire!

Fire what though? A simple block? Nah, not much fun that. Knowing full well that only competitors will use that service to check out which keywords your pages might rank for, I would feed the requests dud content. Lorem ipsum anyone? How about random content about keyword theft? Here is an SEO exercise for you: which keywords can you get the Adwords keyword tool to show about your pages? To rephrase: what keywords can you "rank" for in the tool?

And don’t forget to go back into your logs and see how many times people have stalked you.