Why is my website embedded inside this Iranian one?

[Zippy-Bungle]

I just did a search for something and my own website tured up at 1, but this other wbsite turned up at 2 with what looked like my content http://sport.aliexirs.ir/ASTM-A-Plate-Grades-HIC.html. so I clicked on it and it is my website running inside a frame.

so what is this all about? Do I need to worry? And what should I do?

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, you should initiate an action against them but before doing that, have a word with them and ask them to take it down. They are trying to hijack your prospect visitors by showing your content in an iframe of their website. This is a known dirty trick. By the way, when I clicked the click you mentioned, it took me to a download and probably an adaware of malware.

Please do not keep quite and act now to have that malicious site to stop showing your content. Also, they are eating up your server's bandwidth. You can even complain this to the other website's hosting provider.

Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

Since an iframe is just a window into your site, it cannot harm your site and it doesn’t put you in a spammy neighbourhood as all of the links to your page are from within your own site.

It will be registering views and visits on your analytics too, so you’re still getting some extra traffic. If you feel this Iranian traffic is unwanted, not converting or are simply just annoyed that this site is using your content as their own, you can actually block iframe calls quite easily.

There are a couple of things you could do:

.htaccess

Simply add this line to enable iframe calls from your own domain, but block them from external sites:

Header always append X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN

Or disable iframe calls entirely with:

Header set X-Frame-Options DENY

These directives will only work if you have enabled mod_headers in apache.

Another way to deal with it would be to use a javascript redirect when the top url does not match the page URL like this:

if(top != self) { top.location = self.location; }

Hope this helps,

Tom