Another credit union blogjacking victim
At first I thought that Arizona Federal Credit Union had decided to “Go Blog” in the worst possible way. What the heck was I looking at? What credit union in their right mind would put google ads on their blog?
Ahhh, yeah. I looked at the URL.
While the blog was called the Arizona Federal Credit Union Blog – it was not. It was a focusfinal.com spoofed or “Blogjacked” blog with Arizona Federal’s name slapped across the top.
Now, some may not understand why someone would go through the trouble to set this up. Simple. It’s for the dough baby.
See, the site is flooded with Google ads. The content (text) of the blog itself is full is scraped from PR websites and newspaper websites all about AFCU. Now I won’t bore you with how this is accomplished technically, but it is relatively simple. It is full of keywords and phrases because of this and in the search strings I have tried – ranks right below the CU’s banking site.
I tried:
- “Arizona IDSafeChoice Plus “ and it came up as the 3rd site. Two positions below the AFCU site.
- “AZFCU Rates “ and it came up as the 3rd site. Two positions below the AFCU site.
- “AZFCU credit union “ and it came up as the 4th site. Three positions below the AFCU site.
See how much this can hurt your brand?
I took the action of notifying the credit union’s fraud department. I know that their brand, members and reputation is important to them and things like this can hurt them. Members and potential members may visit this site and click on a competitor’s link taking them away from the credit union. Sites like this could also embed code into the user’s computer and then capture their online banking info via a key logging application.
It looks to me that this site has been up for some time. It scores well in Google and that doesn’t happen overnight. It is a shame – and the credit union was the victim.
Popularity: 75% [?]
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Tony, I have google alerts set up for “UFirst FCU” and “the Boardcast” as well as “credit union boards”, “federal credit union” and “credit union”. Do you recommend any others. How does one get a site like this taken down?
Ginny, I would also recommend common mispellings of your credit union name, multiple abbrevieations, your city name and the words “Credit Union” in quotes.
I found this one because one of my alerts is
“Credit Union” marketing
And I saw the AZFCU blog and thought “Hmmm, lets see what they are up to.”
I would also recommend adding your name, the CEOs name and specific product names to your list. My Google list has about 40 search terms in it.
Don’t forget the judicious use of quotation marks. For example, for you I would have the following set up:
UFrist
UFirst
UFFCU
First “Credit Union” Plattsburgh
Plattsburgh “Credit Union”
“First Federal” “Credit Union”
“First Federal” “Credit Union” Plattsburgh
And so on. Do you see how I use mispellings and groupings of words by quote marks? Also using unique branded words like UFirst is good.
Also, I mention using unique words in your image names on your website so that you can track if anyone has set up a spoofed site like what happened to NavyFCU when we found a spoofed version of their site. If their logo were named Ha-Ha_Blogjacker.jpg - they could have a google alert set up for that and known immediately when their site was spoofed.
I would also set up google analytics on your CU website to see if there are other sites that are linking to your credit uniuon website.
And dont forget to reread http://cuhype.com/2007/06/08/protecting-your-credit-union’s-reputation-a-user’s-guide/
In case I forgot anything.
Tony, thanks so much for the suggestions. I certainly don’t have everything covered but I’ll be implementing what you suggested.
Ginny, here is another post. I hope it helps.
http://cuhype.com/2008/03/05/how-to-what-to-do-when-your-cu-gets-blogjacked/
[…] Another credit union blogjacking victim – This is where I talk about what happened to the folks at AFCU. Someone used their name to set up a fake blog that steals news about their credit union to sell Google ads. […]
Here’s another website for “Teachers Credit Union” from the same blogjackers:
http://tinyurl.com/3yzwd4