Recently, I got into somewhat of an “war” with a competing website. The details aren’t that exciting… lets just say we went from friendly competitors to bitter enemies in a few days time.

Basically, we started as friendly competitors and even had eachother listed in our “links” section. They slowly but surely started borrowing ideas/concepts, organization, theme/design, until after awhile their site looked like a carbon copy of mine. But what really ticked me off is when they sent me an e-mail saying, “Thanks for your ideas. Sorry you’re mad but our site is better than yours now. We are removing you from our blogroll. Go fuck yourself.”

Really? Are you freaking kidding me? Fine… have it your way… assholes.

Goal: Return the favor.

Method: Use Google Adwords to advertise on their site using site targeting with the title “WebsiteHere.com Sucks”. Geographically target the entire world but exclude their state/country of origin so they never know it’s happening.

Step by step:

Step 1: Log into your Adwords account and create a placement-targeted campaign:

Step 2: Fill out the two fields and then select to CHANGE TARGETING… this is important so they don’t see what you are doing and simply exclude your website in their Adsense panel.

Step 3: Switch over to the bundles tab, scroll down to “All Countries and Territories (Bundle)” and check off the box. This will auto-select every single grouping and place them all underneath in your selected locations box as well.

Step 4: Scroll down and click the text link below your Selected Locations box that says: “Exclude Areas Within Selected Locations”

Step 5: Find out where they live and select the enemy’s location from the “Exclude Locations” tab. Google seems to think they are “customers” and we are going to serve them so nobody can complain.

As you can see, my customers are from Ohio. You can find their location using a whois lookup, googling them, reading their “About Us” page or something like that. If worst comes to worst you could always exclude their whole country if you know what country they are from and advertise to the rest of the world.

Something to keep in mind… they might work in a different state than they live. There also might be more than one person contributing to the site. Be liberal with your exclusion ranges to avoid getting “caught”.

Step 6: Make sure that you can see they are excluded by looking in your selection list. If they are, click Done and Done and continue on, if not then you missed something.

Step 7: Write a really harsh, eye catching ad and fill out the rest as you would normally create an Adwords campaign.

Step 8: Sit back, relax and enjoy the proud feeling of serving your targeted customers.