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AVG hijacking 404 traffic
July 15th, 2008 by Scott Thomas
This morning, I stumbled across another interesting “feature” of AVG Anti-virus Free. 404 hijacking. By default, AVG watches for 404s and when it sees one, it redirects you automatically to a generic AVG search page.
The problem here is that most webmasters have custom 404s that provide the visitor with alternate pages based on the error. For instance, if we see that someone searched for “laywer” we may ask, are you looking for our “lawyers” and provide them with a link to the lawyer directory. If we predict that they followed an old link, we may direct them to the search page.
The other issue here is that every one of the “suggestions” that AVG provides is a paid listing! So, unless you are paying for kewords similar to the word that triggered the 404, the visitor will find your competition instead.
AVG claims that their 404 redirect is meant to help you find what you were looking for. Yeah right!
If you happen to mistype an address to a web page or try to go to a website that does not exist, AVG provides you with a redirect page that is meant to help provide you some suggestions to the actual webpage or information you were trying to find, including a Yahoo search box to help you search for what you are looking for.
Below is a screenshot of AVG’s 404 page.
Clicking any of the “related search categories” returns results only from Yahoo’s paid listings.
Likewise, searching for a keyword phrase returns only results from Yahoo’s paid listings, even if the search query would have ranked #1 in the free listings.
As you can see below, a search for “beasley allen law firm” from the AVG 404 page returns only paid results, which in this case means the user gets nothing.
Searching the same keyword phrase (”beasley allen law firm”) on Yahoo, Google, MSN correctly return Beasley Allen Law Firm as the #1 result in the organic listings.
