British police have shut down more than 1,200 websites selling fake designer clothing in jewelry in the past week. And along with those websites, they've taken out some of Google's top results.
Thanks to a tweet tip, the aftermath of Scotland Yard's crackdown can be seen with a Google UK search for 'ugg boots'. As I write this, no less than seven of the top 10 results on the first page for this search are inaccessible. One of the websites that can't be accessed includes the top-ranked site: okuggboots.co.uk.
The Scotland Yard crackdown, dubbed Operation Papworth, was designed to protect consumers from criminals hawking fake wares using websites set up on .co.uk domains. The body that handles domain registrations in the UK, Nominet, cooperated in the operation.
According to the BBC, Ugg brand boots were a popular target for fraudsters and complaints about fake Ugg boots had skyrocketed over the past year. More than 400 of the websites caught in the Operation Papworth dragnet were selling fake Ugg boots.
While designer knockoffs and the internet have had cozy relationship for years, Operation Papworth has exposed the fact that many online criminals are well-versed in blackhat SEO. Without top SERPs, the online storefronts being used to sell counterfeit goods to consumers would have been far less successful. But by controlling the first page of Google's results for a popular search query like 'ugg boots', one can only imagine how much revenue the fraudsters pulled in before Operation Papworth put a dent in business.
The real story here is how criminals came to own the SERPs. As I've written before, Google's ability to detect webspam and paid links appears at times to be non-existent. A quick look at the backlinks for okuggboots.co.uk provides perhaps the most shameful example of this. Out of the 400 or so backlink results displayed, most are on Chinese websites. And because link: only returns a subset of the full backlinks, this is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
The question, of course, is why Google would rank okuggboots.co.uk -- a British site -- so highly when so many of its backlinks appear to come from Chinese websites, the majority of which have .cn domains and minimal English text. An even bigger question is how Google missed the questionable nature of the backlinks themselves. The following HTML code from one of the Chinese websites was placed above the starting <html> tag of the page:
<marquee height=1 width=5 SCROLLAMOUNT=3000 SCROLLDELAY=20000>
<a href="http://www.supplyugg.com/">ugg boots</a>
<a href="http://www.bestuggboots.co.uk/">uggs</a>
<a href="http://www.uggforever.co.uk/">uggs</a>
<a href="http://www.supplyugg.co.uk/">uggs</a>
<a href="http://www.okuggboots.co.uk/">uggs</a>
<a href="http://www.okugg.co.uk/">uggs</a>
<a href="http://www.uggforever.co.uk/">ugg</a>
<a href="http://www.okuggboots.co.uk/">ugg</a>
<a href="http://www.saleugg.co.uk/">ugg</a>
</MARQUEE>
Given the nature of the links, it seems pretty likely that many of these backlinks were placed on websites that had been compromised (the HTML above is from a Chinese government website). And while there's obviously no way to tell how much weight, if any, was given to these links, it's absolutely astonishing that such a blatant and unsophisticated hidden linking tactic could be used in such a widespread fashion, all while Google still gives the linked-to websites top SERPs as opposed to penalties or outright bans.
Adding insult to injury, it doesn't take much to pick up traces of another tactic used by okuggboots.co.uk: comment spam, all over the place.
I don't know how else to say it: Operation Papworth has completely exposed Google. I wouldn't go so far as to 'blame' Google for all the consumers who were undoubtedly scammed after searching for 'ugg boots' and being led to a counterfeiter's website, and to be fair to Google, policing the internet isn't an easy task. But it's really hard to imagine how Google's webspam detection could be this flawed.
One can only hope that Google is paying attention to this situation and looking at all the obvious things it's clearly not paying attention to right now. For the time being, most consumers certainly aren't aware of just how much Google seems to be letting them down, but make no doubt about it: Google's SERPs are golden because consumers trust them. After seeing this, I can't help but think that maybe that trust is misplaced. If Google doesn't recognize the value of that trust, it risks eventually losing it.
Photo credit: Mykl Roventine via Flickr.
Learn more...
Econsultancy has published an SEO Best Practice Guide, a comprehensive report about search engine optimization written by Dr Dave Chaffey which has been described as the 'SEO Bible'. We have also published a business case for SEO and a Request for Proposal template file for those looking to hire an SEO agency.
Patricio Robles is a tech reporter at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter.
Posted 07 December 2009 10:32am by Patricio Robles with 30 comments
Tags: Google, Operation Papworth, Scotland Yard, criminals, scams, counterfeiters, Ugg boots, webspam, paid links, SERPs
Topics: Ecommerce, Legal Issues Online, Online Advertising, Search Marketing - Organic/Natural (SEO)
Sectors: Consumer Goods, Retail, Technology
Digg this
Stumble It!
Bookmark on Delicious
Websites vs Facebook Pages: which URL should you promote? 
10 heinous usability crimes committed by Playmobil
Google
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
12:39PM on 7th December 2009
It's about time Google started recognising these dodgy techniques and put more emphasis on true user value. Everyone else can see these things going on so it can't be that hard for Google to pick up on them!
8:35PM on 7th December 2009
Agree that Google can't be directly blamed for the losses the tens of thousands of UK consumers who have been scammed by these sites.
The can be blamed for ignoring all the spam reports, the posts to their own forums, the approaches by merchants and trade mark holders, etc, etc.
As for how much weight Google gives to tricks like the one highlighted? Loads. I've seen sites where that is the ONLY techique they have used to build links, yet the site ranks in position 4 for a keyword where a page 1 ranking is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds pa in sales.
8:58PM on 7th December 2009
Does anyone know what you should do if you have purchased goods from these sites only to have them shut down days later? Leaving you out of pocket?
10:32PM on 7th December 2009
Thanks so much for this article. I was the opriginal tweeter and like you I was quite shocked that:
1. SO many of the top 10 results were dead (Google needs to speed up the indexing refresh rate)
2. The dodgy Blackhat stuff I see every day which I report and no action is ever taken. Take for instance, the white on white text/background of this site: http://www.bigboystoys.com.au - This is the oldest trick in the book and it remains undetected and unpenalised?
But getting back to the point of your article; to the people who were hoodwinked and scammed of their money - blame Google. The situation wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad if Google's web spam systems actually worked. Frankly speaking, they've been asleep at the wheel.
10:53AM on 8th December 2009
it's about time Google started recognising these dodgy techniques and put more emphasis on true user value. Everyone else can see these things going on so it can't be that hard for Google to pick up on them!
i agree with it
11:48AM on 8th December 2009
Another thing that strikes me as being odd about this story is how little people in the industry seem to care about it.
As way of an example, I just searched for "papworth" on a very popular website that purportedly covers Google related news (hint: it rhymes with pashable), and from what I can see they haven't even acknowledged it as an issue. (note I just picked them at random, I don't have any axe to grind. I could equally have noted that this is not a featured/most viewed/most commented story here on eConsultancy).
In the last two days the aforementioned site has managed 8 stories on Google, but haven't bothered with the fact that, basically:
Google can't stop spam so everything ever written about SEO is basically one big fat lie, because it turns out you can't compete with 20,000 hidden links.
I do understand that unless you are:
a) running a legitimate website that has spent the last year trying to compete with these spammers, or
b) a victim of one of the scam sites
then you haven't personally been affected by this, but surely people can see the wider implications?
My napkin maths would suggest that the losses suffered by UK consumers via this scam will easily total into the eight figures this year.
And even if that doesn't excite, what about a more technical angle: for the keywords I am monitoring, they still haven't even cleared their index of the sites that have been pulled despite the police actions having been taken prior to the 3rd of this month (according to the http://cms.met.police.uk/news/policy_organisational_news_and_general_information/mps_e_crime_unit_takes_down_scam_websites).
This is the biggest shopping week of the year, and Google have left sites that no longer exist on page 1 for key shopping phrases for over 5 days now (so much for real time search...)
And finally, I would note that despite this welcome intervention by the UK police nothing has been done to stop all the ".org", ".com", ".etc" scam sites run by the same criminals which still dominate the rankins.
I presume that dealing with these is out with the jurisdiction of the Met, but surely Google could have taken the hint and had a quick rummage around the backlinks of sites ranking for the affected terms (or even just those operating from China or with a lot of Chinese sites linking to them).
Or do they have better things to do?
12:01PM on 8th December 2009
p.s. Lol. Even this post has been comment spammed by one of these sites. Either that or Angela can get you a cheap pair of Uggs this Christmas... She'll even give you $10 off if you pay by Western Union.
Incidentally, Paypal are also quite a big part of this story, as they are the payment processor of choice. From what I understand (having read the first hand accounts of loads of victims of this scam on a blog I run), the Chinese-based criminals use accounts belonging to people based in the UK/US (witting or unwitting - I don't know) to move the money.
When the customer contacts Paypal, they are told that nothing can be done to give the customer their money back. Sometimes when the customer then contacts their bank, the bank insists that unless the site claimed expressly to be selling legitimate goods, then nothing can be done (although they often back down when the customer kicks up a stink).
Reading accounts on a near daily basis of people who have lost not trivial sums of money buying birthday and Christmas gifts (or just a treat for themselves) means that I am personally delighted that this issue is now at least sort of in the open, so forgive me for wittering on a bit in these comments...
12:31PM on 8th December 2009
The sensible lesson to learn from this would be to use your credit card for all online purchases.
BB
5:53PM on 8th December 2009
I'm sure sooner or later Google will have caught on and dropped the sites from the ranks but it's a shame that their ability to detect scams is really pretty sh*te and it takes the likes of Scotland yard to get them sorted out.
It just means that for short termers you can easily make a quick few bucks on the Interweb still and then move on to the next scam when you get caught. I may even take advantage of this myself while the going is good ;-)
Tech Reporter at Econsultancy
6:23PM on 8th December 2009
cm,
It is incredible that these sites haven't been pulled from Google's index. As I write this, okuggboots.co.uk still occupies the top spot. Methinks people need to be fired over this.
Moo,
Sadly Google's apparent inability or willingness to address this very serious issue will only help to make online crime far more attractive to many people. After all, if you can rake in 6 or 7 figures a year pretty easily using blackhat techniques, why bother spending years building up legitimate SERPs for a legitimate business? If you get shut down, move on to the next scam. By all appearances, your blackhat techniques from 1998 will still work.
7:55PM on 8th December 2009
Moo: It should not be a case of Google catching on. As Patricio explains in his article and comment, the techniques these sites are using were so old fashioned that even today's blackhatters probably thought them beyond the pale (note I say "are" - this is still a live issue for all domains except ".co.uk".)
I've been kicking around the net since the late 90's and until this year I hadn't seen white links on a white background for a long time - probably close to a decade.
However, for five months this was the sole linking technique (actually there was some grey links on grey backgrounds as well) that a brand new site used to obtain (within a couple of months of being registered) and maintain a position above the fold on page 1 for a massive money keyword. Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 such links was all it took to rank above Amazon who had produced a very keyword rich page with plenty of internal links flowing to it, as well as at least twenty or thirty other serious merchants with decent sites and at least some SEO skills.
Patricio: I personally would be extremely interested to here what Google's response to Papworth is (their serious technical response, not whatever bland PR statement they'll come up with about not being the internet police - which of course sidesteps the issue that they might not be the internet police but they are responsible for their own website!), although I can't see any evidence that they have responded at all to it.
It seems to me that they have been caught in a perfect storm of:
a) Absolutely no real competition
b) A complete noise vs signal problem:
"I'm sorry I can't hear you over the media coverage of our operating system, our programming lanuage, our real time search, our barcode stickers in shop windows... what are you saying about web spam"
"Your search results and your adwords listings are utter junk"
"pardon, you'll need to shout or go speak to Matt Cutts he knows how to stop web spam"
"You are facilitating one of the biggest consumer frauds of recent years by your inaction"
"Sorry, I can't hear you, anyway I've got to go update my Wave now. I want Mexican food, not Pizza and I can't make the BBQ on Saturday..."
Yes some of the new stuff Google is doing is great, but it is all built on their supposed core skills in producing the best possible search results, which they only seem to be able to do when there aren't any criminals with a copy of Blackhat 101 around.
(And to be completely fair, Bing and Yahoo are also just as bad. Which suggests that the whole industry has a bit of an elephant in the room to address).
3:42AM on 9th December 2009
This story mimics a situation we're looking at for a US site for "business insurance" in Google. The top site (won't name names) has virtually all "Russian" domain backlinks on pages w/ virtually no English - except for the links to this site.
We're competing in the marketplace - imagine explaining to a great client why this shady site is owning the top ranking.
The engines appear to allow some tactics while blocking others... perhaps they are looking erroneously too often.
2:30AM on 10th December 2009
7 days on and there are still sites that were pulled on page 1 for various high traffic terms... Does no one from Google read the news?
8:44AM on 10th December 2009
The other thing to note is how many of the PPC adverts for terms like "ugg boots" are for these fake sites. Google must be taking in a fair amount of money from these businesses.
7:53PM on 10th December 2009
Proof that the scammers (in this case fake ghd sellers) are just switching domains: http://twitter.com/GHDStyleAcademy/status/6330456155 (and that they are spamming the heck out of twitter - I shudder to think what RTS is going to bring). From their new site: "To serve more global customers, we change our domain name from www.ghdhairsales.co.uk to www.ghdhairsales.uk.com. Now we not only focus on UK customers but customers worldwide,hoping more and more customers can get access to our website. We will try our best to provide more exquisite GHD and bigger discounts for you. Besides, our service mailbox has been changed to service@ghdhairsales.uk.com. If any question or problem, please feel free to contact us. Sorry for all the inconvenience. Wish you enjoy online shopping at www.ghdhairsales.uk.com"
7:53AM on 11th December 2009
I noticed this trend when I found a over 150 links pointing to my local city .gov site. Ill link to the yahoo site explorer instead of it. http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geuspk.SFLHM0AjWpXNyoA?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.riversideca.gov%2Ffire%2FUSAR%2FPrimarydiscussion%2F000000bd.htm%3Fbuy-soma+-site%3Ariversideca.gov&fr2=sb-top&sao=1 Basically the spam method mixes in links to legit sites as a way to increase the authority. They point to redirects and 404 on .edu and .gov sites as a way to roll the links through a higher domain authority.
Web Monitoring Manager at SciVisum.co.uk
11:53AM on 11th December 2009
Google.co.uk this morning, still lists unreachable sites in top 10.
One site that does still exist, has a page 'Counterfeit Ugg Boot guide' - which Google cached on Dec 4th: so they seemed to have moved quickly.
The page says:
10:21PM on 11th December 2009
The thing people are missing is the fact that the mechanisms themselves are flawed. New web protocols needs to be designed to allow for open, crowdsourced credibilty feedback on individual websites.
5:47AM on 16th December 2009
There's lots of blackhat techniques which continue to work, but require more volume (READ: more links) to accomplish rankings of value.
The black hat approach is churn and burn, making as much as possible in short periods. It's been said that those in the top spots for viagra make upwards of US$20k per day.
One thing is for sure, these sites are unlikely to evolve into brands
12:20PM on 18th December 2009
...and that is exactly the point! These SEO methods are only sucessful short term. It´s alsways a matter of the risk you wan´t to take. If it doesn´t really matter to get a certain domain-name banned and burned, then go for it. Try to get as much traffic as possible, it´s not illegal in a sense a laws. Selling cheap duplicates is indeed!! These SEO methods are basicallly used by affiliates, not really by brands trying to place and brand themselves on the internet for a long term success.
Web Monitoring Manager at SciVisum.co.uk
12:47PM on 18th December 2009
> These SEO methods are only sucessful short term Short term for any 1 site: but not short term as a threat to regular sites like ours. > these sites are unlikely to evolve into brands So what? They still damage regular sites. The threat is: If the short-terms 'tricks' make big money, then more players will follow, Thus: more and more often our sites will suffer, being pushed down the rankings. It's false comfort to say 'oh well, the short-termer-site soon disappears'. Because potentially there is another similar site that immediately jumps to the top of Google in the place, and our sites would be permanently losing out.
Web Monitoring Manager at SciVisum.co.uk
1:38PM on 18th December 2009
Something screwed up the formatting of my post... I'll try again:
> These SEO methods are only sucessful short term
Short term for any 1 site: but not short term as a threat to regular sites like ours.
> these sites are unlikely to evolve into brands
So what? They still damage regular sites.
The threat is: If the short-terms 'tricks' make big money, then more players will follow, Thus: more and more often our sites will suffer, being pushed down the rankings. It's false comfort to say 'oh well, the short-termer-site soon disappears'.
Because potentially there is another similar site that immediately jumps to the top of Google in the place, and our sites would be permanently losing out.
7:22PM on 18th December 2009
Are All of you just STUPID? These sites - no matter what YOU think of them - are valuable to everyone. 1.) They are using "affiliate links" so they make money when someone buys from their site 2.) Uggs benefits because they sell more boots 3.) The buyer benefits because they get the product they wanted. No one got hurt in the process. Oh... Google's ego is a little bruised... but other than that it's just another case of people interfering in something they don't fully understand. This merchant will sell less products with these sites off the net. Period. Mike
2:26AM on 21st December 2009
I think you may have missed the point completely Mike. The boots being sold as Uggs are not in fact made by Ugg, they are made in factories in third world countries (but that is where Ugg boots are made too!) so Ugg make no money out of this.
Ugg does not in fact sell more boots they sell less as they have no connection with the banned sites.
The buyer may or may not get the product they wanted. Granted that some of the knock off boots may be the equal of boots produced by Ugg, many are not, and thus may not be value for money.
Blackhatters have known of these spam methods for years and they still work at least for short periods of time. But so long as there is money to be made using the "churn and burn" methodology being used hereit will continue.
Although the solution to this problem can only lie with Google, its not as easy as you might think to devise methods that trap the blackhatters, but leave genuine sellers untouched. One thing is for sure, not matter what scheme Google comes up with there will be a swarm of black hatters staing by eager to find and profit from getting aroung the new algos.
10:02AM on 30th December 2009
I learn from this post and get more seo experience. Thanks!
12:38PM on 6th January 2010
You are really true,all google claims about detecting blackhat seo is not proven.Thanks for the nice job though.
4:22PM on 7th January 2010
Google needs tons and tons of websites and traffic to survive against the competition, blackhatters found a way to give them that and get money out of it.
So who is going to complain...??
4:07AM on 15th January 2010
Has it ever stopped working?
3:59AM on 24th January 2010
thanks for the info! we all know google has flaws, I think its interesting that people exposed them. Google should be able to manually crack down pretty fast when this happens but still....
4:24PM on 25th January 2010
this just shows that googles spam filters are mostly a myth, i see the chinese doing this all the time.