Creative uses of Google Tag Manager: site hacking/ripping

In my series on creative uses of Google Tag Manager and Analytics, here is a specific use case I thought i’d share with you.

I recently saw my blog content got ripped and reposted on another website, laced with porn content. Here is how I fought back with the help of Google Tag Manager.

My website got ‘hacked’ recently. Or so I thought. As it turns out, I was looking at my Google Analytics reports and I saw pages that didn’t belong. Uh oh. Those have racy-looking URLs.

Of course these URLs are not hosted on my website (I did check :D) so the next thing to look for is Host Name.

As it turns out, onerootmusic.com is a website for a band or music collective in Latvia, which I tried contacting by e-mail, then tried contacting their webhost. Maybe i’m impatient but I couldn’t be bothered to wait for their answer.

Since the offending party had ripped my ENTIRE content – including my Google Tag Manager container snippet – I figured I’d take the offensive myself and have a little nerdy fun in the process.

So I logged onto Google Tag Manager and I started by creating a rule (trigger) where:

• URL contains onerootmusic.com
• event is equal to gtm.js (sorta executes first/faster)

Then I created a custom tag using the above rule:

<style>
  body {
   display: none !important;
   // hides page content
}
</style>
<script>
  // nags that damn pervert
  alert("you\’re a pervert and this content was ripped off another site");
  document.location="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ";
</script>

Publish your updated container and bam!

This particular page gives you an idea of what this GTM setup accomplishes. The alert then takes you elsewhere once you click that OK button… 🙂

So there. I can’t change the negative impact this content ripping/hacking will have on my SEO until the host/webmaster removes the fricking folder containing tainted content but in the meantime, I’ll have a little fun at the expenses of those perverts.

So that was it for more creative uses of Google Tag Manager. What is the most original way you’ve used GTM? (or any tag manager for that matter)
Let me know in the comments!