Adverlets seem to have a problem with their domain name. It’s serious as it hijacks your entire website and redirects to a page that looks like a parked domain page. I normally see this when I just bought a domain name but don’t have any content yet.

I’m pretty disappointed as despite the seriousness of this problem, it’s not been fixed since last night. If an ad hijacks your website, it doesn’t matter whether it was accidental and without malicious intent, it’s still very bad in my books. Being a programmer before I know these would be grounds for serious tongue lashing (or threat of job firing) from my boss if I was even remotely responsible for the website.

I’m removing all Advertlets ads until the matter is resolved. A quick Google search and it looks like many Malaysian bloggers have removed their Advertlets ads too.

Some blogs like Krazl even suggested that the site was hacked which was of course not. The ‘parked’ page contain a small javascript frame breaker script which if inserted into your website would make the Advertlets ads break out of the frame it was in. In this case the frame container was your website. This means once the Advertlets ad ‘breaks out’, it would look like a redirect to the Advertlets.com domain. (It’s not a AJAX injection but a old but common javascript)

Cyberhacks suggested that this was a publicity stunt to gain backlinks to Advertlets. If this is true, it definitely result ed in increase backlinks for them but this is at the expense of sacrificing Advertlets credibility. Come on, who would want to trust their advertising dollars to a company that forgets to renew their domain or even pay at least one or two years in advance as suggested by Hong Kiat. I do not want to slam Advertlets but this clearly dampens my confidence in Advertlets.

Other blogs about Advertlets:



Lots of publicity, but it looks like all the posts are mostly negative about this mishap. I for one would not want such publicity. Anyway, I’m sure this problem will be corrected soon (hopefully).

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