Don't Let Your Site Get Framed

Looking at my referral logs, I can’t help feeling disgust for all those social networks out there whose members appear to be the most illiterate computer users and the worst offenders on the bandwidth leeching front. Ironically, one of their most popular accomplices is Google Images where those freeloaders tend to harvest links.

Google Images, besides other offenders, displays your site in a frame. Here’s a simple JavaScript snippet to rid of the frame and reload the page to its proper URL:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top != self)
   top.location.href = location.href;
</script>

self refers to the current window; top is a reference to the top-level window which contains the current window. In a "frame-less" setting the current window object is also the parent and top object. Otherwise somebody is framing you. Feel free to replace location.href with a URL to some page which extols virtues of good netizens.

Awesome and timely. Thanks!

"worst offenders on the bandwidth leeching front". Can't agree more!

Milan, could you expand on the bandwidth-sucking practices of leeches? Perhaps my site isn't attractive enough for folks to want to frame it, but I do see referrals from social network sites. I thought these were clicking-through. How do you know from the logs that they're putting your site into a frame? And how/why is this bad as long as your content is served up? I'm obviously missing something here...

More often than not they go to Google Images, find something that pleases them and then simply copy URLs to their pages, thus serving your content and taking your bandwidth without your consent.

Some sites have the guts to display your site in a frame, again Google being one of them.

I take several measures against leechers, unwanted bots, offending domains, etc, by running an HttpModule I wrote which watches for all these things.