Another site is full page framing our site: any Google damage?

[ianevans]

While looking at my Adsense report today, I noticed a domain in there that isn't ours.

I've been running our site since 1997. Today I noticed an unknown site in our reports and when I went to it, it has our site in a full page iframe, that is, there are no bars on top. Its sole apparent reason to exist appears to be displaying our site with a different URL.

Currently all the ads are still ours, internal links still point to us, but I'm concerned that it will begin to engage in clickjacking, damage our standing with Google, or damage the name we've built in the news world.

The site that is hijacking us is literally our sitename with the word blog appended to it and it appears to have been registered yesterday, Dec. 2nd, 2013. I've already filed a complaint with the domain registrar.

Will this cause us any issues with Google like duplicate content? Or is the fact that it's in an iframe save us from that?

[mrengine]

Use .htaccess to block the domain that is loading your website.

Will this cause us any issues with Google like duplicate content?

Google has many problems at the moment. That's why so many people are copying other peoples content and ranking it, but an iframe will not work for thieves. Guard your content like your home, because Google fumbles badly on determining who the original author is.

[bwnbwn]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Do what mrengine says today. If you don't know how it is an easy search.

[Marshall]

You can also add a break out of frames script to your pages.

Marshall

[ianevans]

Thanks. It's an nginx server, so I'll check on their list.

[MrSavage]

Been there. Not to be a downer, but if it's the same site as I'm thinking, I had to write off a couple sites because of it. I'm slowly thinking the algo is onto it, but I looked at the troubleshooting fixes and honestly didn't remedy the situation. Once your authority is gone, you're lost in this black hole. Take some text from your site, put in quotes in search, if they rank and you don't? You've been sucked in. Sorry, just explaining what happened to me. Sounds like exactly the same, but of course we can't mention names here. The only solution I had moving forward was to drastically reduce rss feeds from my wordpress sites and ensure it's only a snippet. The sites lost to the black hole? A little late for that. I'm sure if I add enough content, new stuff that won't get displayed on their site, that I might at some point regain authority for my own content. I can honestly say that if we're talking the same site, then many people are living in complete ignorance regarding where all their traffic went. I could write a book about the situation but I'll leave that for now. All the solutions are after the fact. If you lost ownership, please update with any solutions you find. I'm all ears.

[ianevans]

Not sure if you mean "the same company" instead of "the same site" in your first sentence as this site has only been around since Dec. 2nd and basically has the same domain name as us except with the world blog appended to it. They have whoisguard on it but it looks like they're from Panama.

[JD_Toims]

Use .htaccess to block the domain that is loading your website.

"Blocking the domain itself" won't do any good, especially for search bots, because browsers request the contents of the <frame> or <iframe>, not the site doing the framing.

The only way to do anything at all I can think of with mod_rewrite would be to block the site as a referrer, but search engine bots don't send referrer headers, so it is only effective for real visitors to the site doing the framing.

A frame-buster should land real visitors on the right site and not have an "it doesn't work" association with the name of the domain ["normal" people don't have a clue what a frame or iframe is, and don't know if a site is being framed or not, and likely don't care as long as it works], so personally, I'd let the frame buster do it's job and "steal" the real visitors back, because "blocking display to real visitors" could easily give a "negative impression" they could associate with the real site since the domain names are the same except the word blog.

[ianevans]

I've been trying to find a frame buster that would allow framing from a list of sites (stumbleupon is all I can think of right now) but bust out for anything not in the list. Any ideas?

[aakk9999]

With regards to possible SEO implications, it may be worthwhile reading a thread describing a weird framing case where the framing page ranked for the framed content. The discussion can be found here:

How is a page ranking with no content except for a frame?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4602577.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I have to add that in the above linked thread, both the framed and framing content had the same WhoIs. Not sure if the framing page would rank for the framed content if the whois was different.

[JD_Toims]

As far as a frame-buster with allowed sites goes, something like the following should do it.

var allowedList = /^(www\.)?(example\.com|site\.com|another-site\.com)$/;
var currentHost = location.hostname;
var allowedHost = currentHost.search(allowedList);

if(top!=self && allowedHost==-1) { top.location.replace(location); }

Note: This is "off the top of my head" and untested, so it might need a bit of adjustment I'm not noticing, but it's close to working and efficient. Also, the list of allowed sites is a regular expression, so the . [dot] needs to be escaped with a \ and to add another site, make sure to add another | preceding it.

[ianevans]

Thanks. I'll give that a whirl.

[ianevans]

@JD_Toims,

your javascript worked like a charm. Only have one problem. We're in the middle of a responsive redesign and it kicks us off the site (a mobile emulator) that we use to check. That site (not a dot com) also uses a beta subdomain. I tried this but it didn't work:

/^(www\.|beta\.)?(example\.com|2ndexample\.es)$/;

Any ideas? Thanks!