Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have been trolling Google this week using the search operators such as
LINK:
SITE:
INURL:
INANCHOR:
to catch scammers and scraper sites, and other losers who would otherwise be "linking" to my site using 302 redirects. I already had over 60 sites removed from Google using their useful Urgent URL Removal Tool. I pretty much cleaned most of the offending sites out of the Google index.
But then I found a few sites in Google results who have my site in framed inside their site. This of course is very common.
So you would do a Google search, then see Google’s SERP results, click on one of them, then it goes to the other web site's useless "SERP/scraper" page, where our site is listed with a bunch of wedding web sites in the wedding category through a normal link, no redirects, just a straight anchor. <A HREF….
So you click on “the link to my site” and instead of going directly to our site, you get sucked into a frame on their site, with their banner on the top frame, and my site "sourced" into the bottom frame using a standard frame SRC command.
Will this affect our ranking?
If they want to write something about your content and give you a link thats different.
There is various ways to stop them:
put this in .htaccess
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ".*.example.com/" BadReferrer
deny from *.*.*.*
order deny,allow
deny from env=BadReferrer
replace the *.*.*.* with the sites ip address
this approach has helped get rid of 302 redirects for us in the past.
or you can get frame breaking scripts that are quite effective.
If its hurting your site or not, is another matter.
It could possibly cause your site to trip the dupe content filter depending on the frame used.
Check at the website copyscape, or search for your unique content on google, to see if your content is being duped.
I use a frame-breaking piece of javascript; I'm told it can be beaten, but so far it's worked just fine - and there's plenty of variants about.
Where can I find out more about this frame breaking code, an where do you put it on the server?
thanks!
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (top!=self)
top.location=self.location;
</script.
That said, I haven't seen a regular frame cause a problem for more than two years. This is because your content, even though it appears in the same window as the framing site, is not part of their "page" -- their url. Instead, it is called from your url, so it steals nothing. Issues might arise if they frame a scraped copy of your page, served from a url on their domain. But that's a very different issue.
The issue here -- "page" is not a technical word. Google indexes urls, and a "frameset page" can be composed of many urls. It's a url that appears in the SERP, gets PageRank and so on.
Now I admit I have an evil streak, so when this happens to me I change the name of the web page or image being pirated and replace it with something benignly devious like a piece of fruit.
Plus 'passing off' is copyright theft, plain and simple.
Not theft you can easily prosecute; theft just the same. And if people like what they see and link to him - he's stolen a link that's rightfully yours. Again, not worth the cost of a prosecution - but theft just the same.
Use the javascript kindly placed above - or that orange!
Hey Komodo_Tale, you might be onto something, with the devious idea, here is a devious idea for you. What you could do is once you find these guys framing your page, go back to your page and put up an al Qaeda support page in it's place!
Then the FBI shuts down the scammer's site, then you submit their site to Google's URL removal tool, and no more framer site!
Only flaw with this idea is FBI might also shut down your site!
No seriously though, what would be cool is a simple page notice in big bold letters that says
"I am an internet loser using unethical techniques to sucker you onto my page so I can trick you into downloading virsuses. Do Not Click on anything!"
Now when all these sites frame your page, they shoot themselves in the foot! LOL!
We also like to use the DMCA notices, we have had about 30 sites shut down the past 2 months who copied content from our site, not just framed it.
Point well taken. I thik I'll go the DMCA route, and just get the loser shut down, and use the automatic URL removal tool to clean his site out of Google.
The site I am referring to, like all the other scraper sites, you'll never get any webmaster to see your email, much less respond, as these pages are setup for the sole purpose of outranking you with your own content, hence they will never voluntarily remove any content that is stolen from your site, or framed from your site.
I always strike with full force to ensure things go my way without any delays. For example, we contacted the idiot owner of a dance studio web site 2 weeks ago who promised to remove all the information he stole off our "how to choose a wedding DJ" page of our bridal tips web site.
The aforementioned moron of course did not, he was just stalling us, so one week later, just the other day, I sent a DMCA notice to his web host, then bye bye web site. Then 2 days ago Google notified me that his site was removed from the index.
So those of you in the same boat reading this, don't bother contacing the "owner" of the site, 99% of the time it's hidden behind domains by proxy anyways, just go straight fro the jugular and get it done.
The web hosts are the biggest morons with their heads buried in the sand. They send you stupid responses like "try contacing the offending webmaster and ask him to remove the content in a really nice way and he'll most likely do it."
What planet are these goofballs living on?
In 4 years, battling over 200 scammer web sites, not once did the offending webmaster remove the information, so we no longer start there, we start with the web host. No reason to invlovle the webmaster, since his site is coming down anyway! LOL!
Does that mean that framesets from other sites that include your URL do pass pagerank? What about IFRAMES?
If there is a true link -- an anchor tag -- that causes your url to be displayed in a frame or iframe, then yes, this passes PageRank. However, I'm not so sure about a src attribute, which is the way the initial state of a frame is defined. For several years, spiders didn't even seem to follow urls that only appeared in a src attribute.
I avoid all manner of frames, so I can't say for sure what today's situation is. But I do note that the original PageRank paper did not mention urls appearing in src= attributes.
I do not recomend replacing the content that appears on an offenders website with hateful or agregious messages:
1) That content will still resolve to your domain
2)Just because their behaviour lacks decorum why should yours?
3)Your goal is to nutralize the problem, not to escalate it.
Personally, I always write to webmasters first, if it's a 'one off' theft from someone who liked my content; in all cases bar one, I've had an abject apology, and in in one case I allowed the stuff to stay, with attribution.
Industrial thieves, however, do not justfy the effort or deserve the courtesy; I bypass them.
