10 ways to check if sites are related

There are many reasons - I was going to say legitimate and not, but I think it’s actually all “not” - for a site owner to try to hide which sites he/she owns and operates. When doing your due diligence on the competition, these sites are exactly the types of things you want to uncover. So here is a task list to figure out if those two sites that you are slightly suspicious of are a little too closely related:

1. Check the whois
domaintools.com/domaininquestion.com will quickly tell you if the site owners were complacent enough to just use the same registrant info or same name servers. Sometimes it will be the same DNS privacy company which is a hint in itself. I’ll do another post some other time on how to figure out who it is if the DNS is obfuscated.

2. Reverse IP
This always shows interesting information. See what other sites are hosted on the same box

3. 1-800 number or other phone number listed on the site

4. Pricing on products

5. Tracking code on PPC ads
these can get quite complicated - and quite telling

6. Linking strategies
and lazy crosslinking somewhere if you’re lucky

7. Whois history
This will require a separate membership, but you’ll get all whois information recorded about a domain. Many times, the original owner will not think about future use and just register the domain with their standard account

8. Secure Cert Owner

9. Coding or webmaster tracks
Especially page names: search-results1.aspx on two different sites starts to look suspicious. Check the .css files and the .js files. Anything in the code stick out? Comments?

10. Social Engineering
Call up and ask. Be an advertiser or customer…whatever it would take that would make them want to cater to you. Take it as far as you need to in order to get price list, invoice, insertion order, account, etc.

Now, what can you do with this information? That’s another top 10 list: expose, report, decapitate, etc