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11/04/2001 Archived Entry: "4-Nov-2001 -- WebWord Comment"

WebWord Comment -- My brother just visited my web site a few minutes ago. He sent me an email explaining that a link on WebWord's Hot Sites page now points to a porn site. Yikes! Obviously I removed the link. Has this ever happened to you? How many times have you been fooled by a link? I wonder how often people change their sites from normal content to pornography. I doubt that any research has been done, but does anyone have any data on this?

Replies: 7 comments

I'm not sure that folks intentionally switch to porn. In a case I'm familiar with, the site owners decided to change domain names, and (foolishly) decided not to spend the bucks to redirect their old domain to the new one. Big mistake! When this was pointed out to me by one of our site visitors, I first changed our link to the new one, then did a search on AltaVista to find that over 200 sites linked to the old URL. It's hard to imagine why porn sites go to the trouble though. It's like the whitehouse.gov vs whitehouse.com link. Do they really think they'll convert visitors to sales from folks who really wanted the White House site?

Posted by Beth Mazur @ 11/04/2001 04:22 PM EST

John:

Anecdotal evidence: This happened not long back on a site I maintain for my company. I believe this is most often a result of a domain expiring and porn sites buying the domain name just to transfer you over to one of their sites.

In our case, we got an angry call from a parent whose child had clicked on an innocent-looking link. It was one of those really aggressive ones that opens a new window and maximizes the browser. In one of those weird coincidences, I had just read about one of the foremost perpetrators of this practice, and it turned out to have been perpetrated by that same guy, based on the domain name record.

Folks at my company felt it was best not to talk much about this, which is why I've posted this anonymously.

Proof that automatic link checkers can't tell *what* you're linking to.

Posted by Anonymous @ 11/04/2001 04:31 PM EST

Porn sites have been running scripts that look for expired domains and automatically register them. Cheap way to get some traffic.

Posted by Adam Kalsey @ 11/05/2001 12:27 AM EST

I too have had this happen with links on a client's site. (Links turning into porn links.)

This brings up another issue that is annoying... Acquring a previously used domain for legimate purposes and finding extra baggage - spam. There's nothing like setting up your shiny new domain and receiving 20 spams the first day.

Posted by JS @ 11/05/2001 05:31 PM EST

Oh my gosh. John, you simply must hook up a spell checker to this message board to protect my professional reputation.

Posted by JS @ 11/05/2001 05:33 PM EST

This happened to us once (large software company) but it was the fault of one of our developers. During prototyping on a test server they put in something like xxx as part of the URL as a placeholder, and it was never replaced before going live ... we fixed the link VERY quickly ...

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Posted by spiderman @ 03/05/2002 06:45 PM EST

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