Whats The Idea Behind This?
I need help!
“No surpise there then!” I hear a few of you mumble :p
In the past few years, like many an affiliate, I have had sites ripped, copied and stolen by others in terms of content and design but recently I am completely perplexed as to my latest findings and hope that someone can shed some light on the following.
My Discount Code website has started appearing under a different domain name, one that I do not own. Take a look at my site (http://www.discountcodes.co.uk/) and then look at this other site (http://www.openroadvouchers.co.uk).
You will notice the OpenRoadVouchers domain is exactly the same as my site, and as far as I can see the owner of the domain is using a simple URL forwarder to send the visitors on to mine. All the links that are currently in place mirror my affiliate ID’s so it’s not (yet) scraping all my content for their own use, but I do have concerns.
The website appears to be hosted with EasySpace but the WhoIs record for the domain record shows nothing as I presume the registered owner has decided to make all details private.
My Questions:
Why would someone do this?
How does it benefit someone?
Is this likely to damage my site in any way, shape or form especially when it comes to Search Engine Ranking?
How can I stop this from happening?
Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
5 Comments
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You should be able to use a .htaccess file to prevent your site loading up when the referrer is openroadvouchers. Not an expert on it but it looks like the following link should point you in the right direction : http://drupal.org/node/48052
They are just loading your site in a frame so I wouldn’t worry about it too much from a SEO perspective, if anything it will just be treated as an extra inbound link.
The only reason I can think of doing it is for them to pass the site of as theirs for some reason other than trying to get a commission.
if you use this whois you will get to the owners, an advertising/design/pr company, and may get some more info on what they are up to. http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=openroadvouchers.co.uk
Oh, and as for what you can do, you could add some javascript to break out of the frame and that would help make it clearer to anyone what the real url is – just search to find example code.
Frost, why don’t you just drop the people at Allsop Davies a line and aks them what ther game is?
http://www.allsopp-davies.co.uk/contact_us.htm
Many thanks all.
As I say, as they are not scraping mysite I am not to concerned. I’ve done as Rich has suggested and used a Javascript snippet to breakout from the framed page.
For info – the code I used was from here;
http://javascript.internet.com/page-details/break-frames.html