How Does This Happen?

[MTbowels]

Tonight, I was reading about Great Budworth Church on a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_and_All_Saints%27_Church,_Great_Budworth

On the right hand side of the page, there's a coloured column which has a link to the Church website:

http://www.greatbudworthchurch.org/

When I clicked on the link, it takes me to a page entirely in Chinese or some other oriental language that appears to be selling something that looks like vitamin pills from the photographs and actually contain a caption with the church website address!

How does this happen and what sort of nutter is it that decides to hijack what appears to be a genuine church website to hawk these pills whatever they are.

[MTbowels]

I seem to have found the correct website here:

http://greatbudworthchurch.co.uk/

Could it be that the Wikipedia link has been tampered with?

[Old_Geezer]

Possibly. More likely they didn't renew their www version and a Japanese company picked it up.

[sir.prize]

This is the same Japanese translated into English

https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://www.greatbudworthchurch.org/&prev=search

[Buenchico]

The domain name was originally registered in November 2014 (presumably by someone linked to the church). However they must have indicated that they no longer wished to retain the domain name (as they were actually using the cheaper .co.uk one and could see no point in retaining the .org one) because, when it was due for renewal two years later it was purchased by a Japanese company (but using a 'domain privacy' service to hide their details from public view).

It's fairly common practice for some companies to tell domain registrars that they'll buy up any disused names, in the hope of attracting web traffic. (Even if they don't get any custom from people who were looking for Great Budworth Church, the fact that people are clicking on the link will push their company's website higher up Google's rankings, so other people will be more likely to find it and buy from it).

[jno]

I've removed the Chinese link.

[MTbowels]

sir.prize, you can't beat Google Translate if you want to view a totally incomprehensible foreign website in English! Thank you.

Buenchico, thank you for researching the matter for me. It certainly explains how this situation could have come about and thank you for enlightening me.