A London university directed students to pornography in a link on its Japanese learning resources web page.
Brunel University posted the explicit link under the heading 'Japanese culture' on its official website.
The page invited students at the west London university to click through to a pornography site, which was listed above another link for the British Museum.
The page has since been edited to remove the gaffe after it was spotted by a shocked researcher.
A Brunel University London spokesperson said: “The web address Brunel University London linked to was innocent link to Japan-UK friendship site and so useful to some of our students studying Japanese to help them understand that country’s culture.
"It remained so from 2008 to 2014 when it was put up for sale or rent. Until early August 2015 the site contained no content but it appears at that time the web address was sold or transferred to someone who used it for hosting inappropriate content.
"Brunel has some 44,000 web pages it maintains which contain more than 100,000 links to external websites. We devote and great deal of time and effort to ensure that those links are up to date and are to relevant content.
"We are grateful that the change of content for this link was brought to our attention and we immediately removed it.”
