Ugg Australia SEO
Since yesterday’s blog and video I’ve been doing some more digging on the problem. Here are the searches so far that will reveal sites compromised and copying someone else’s site.
inurl:wikihow1.asp
inurl:ugg.asp
You can add numbered variants on this and you will get even more results. So inurl:ugg6.asp gives results showing the problem. Just using inurl:ugg.asp shows 473,000 results. Most of these will be broken or compromised site. For instance the first result is The Australian Respiratory Council www.thearc.org.au . This is odd what Google has cached though. It is not a direct rip off of another site. It is a spun article page featuring gobbledegook but if you or I click the link we get redirected to www.shoestys.com which is a rip off of Uggaustralia.com
The redirect is not a 302 though but here is the really curious aspect of this compromised site; the actual URL that Google has indexed is www.thearc.org.au/template1.asp?uggb=9262-inurl-ugg-asp-.html . See the second half of that url? It is a dynamically generated one based on a search request. WTF. There’s others like that too http://www.ank.gr/menu.asp?uggb=9262-inurl-ugg-asp-.html. keep in mind that these pages have been indexed by Google and are redirecting users to a site that is copying Ugg Australia.
Microsoft Vulnerability
Yesterday Matt Cutts tweeted about a MS Server security problem. I asked him if it was related somehow to Ugg Australia affair.
So presumably Google (Matt Cutts is not working there at the moment) are at least familiar with this problem, yet the rip off pages are still ranking higher than the originals which would suggest to me that this is not an easy fix for Google.
See the original blog post on this story and the video
What Are The Odds?
You could just check with the Royal Statistical Society.. oh wait that’s right they have been hacked too.
The above image is a screen cap of the page http://www.rss.org.uk/test.asp?uggb=9262-inurl-ugg-asp-.html that Google has cached and of course this URL will redirect you to an Ugg Australia looking site.
Other Australian Sites Compromised
I thought I would start a list here of the Australian sites I find that have been compromised by this hack. These are all redirecting to an Uggs Australia copied site.
Yachtshareinternational.com.au
arc.org.au
wetlandcare.com.au
thatslife.com.au
augoods.com.au
afteraquote.com.au
prw.net.au
anticoagulation.com.au
props.com.au
jpcomputers.com.au
robbospetbarn.com.au (redirecting to uggsonlineau.com)
actionboating.com.au
hdconstructions.com.au
completefto.com.au
The Real Scam
From the investigation above I have found quite a few instances in other industries. At this stage the end goal of the operators is probably selling counterfeit branded products. So you may get a pair of ugg boots that say Ugg Australia on them but like the site you bought them from they will be a rip off. Here’s the search I did to work this out site:com.au inurl:ugg filetype:asp . So that search tells Google that I want to see sites that are .com.au and are using ASP pages that have Ugg somewhere in the URL.
It looks like this scam is rife across a lot of well known brands that get counterfeited. Now it seems they can manipulate Google to their will.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
