Blackhat SEO on Kapook.com
Posted on March 21st, 2008
There’s a big incident for the online society in Thailand recently. Everything starts when a Zickr user post a link to xxx.kapook.com; one of the big portal website in Thailand. He asks why this subdomain contains the adults and sex keywords like (porno, sex vdo clips, raping, hidden cams, sex stories, etc.) and also some sex contents.
screencap from www.pittaya.com shows tons of sex related keywords.
After this post, there are more than six bloggers talk about it in their blogs and it spreads to a press (manager.co.th), who interviewed Mr. Porameth Minsiri; the website owner, the Chairman of Thai Webmaster Association, and moreover, he is the manager of Thai Clean Net Project which intends to increase ‘white’ Thai contents on the internet. Mr. Porameth said that Kapook.com has several domain names and xxx.kapook.com is one of it domains, but never promoted. He also said that the name ‘xxx’ is intended to collect all mystery news and his staffs ‘register’ this name without his acknowledgment. After he knew that the domain was ‘registered’, there is nothing he can do.
“This is not spamdexing (index spamming), or keywords spamming but those interns thought it will be hilarious for users who are trying to find the something sexy, but end up with those homophones or homographs.” Mr. Porameth said.
After the news spread, Kapook.com took down that subdomain for a while, and put it back online again with more ‘clean’ contents. Anyway, the 1 pixel link from it homepage, and some links from other pages are still working.
This is not the first time for Kapook.com’s blackhat strategy, in October 2007, a blogger found 0×0 (zero sized) iframe which contains some random ads limited to 1,000,000 impressions. That means, even if the counter is counted to 1,000,000 impressions, the actual impressions from users will never reach that amount. here’s links to blogs that follow this issue (all in Thai - but with screencaps)