Sunday, August 12, 2012

Domain Name cloaking using frames

Learn't something the other day. We have a wordpress web site on hostable.com and the Domain Name is with Freeparking.


We have been having trouble with the url displaying in the browser. So you get "http://mydomain.com/" no matter what page is displayed - this is pretty useless if you want to bookmark a page.


Lots of web searching revealed that Freeparking cloak your site in a 100% frame - which is VERY bad form as search engines tend to ignore any frame based sites (we couldn't figure out why the site rated so poorley).


So the actual page HTML looks like


<frameset rows="100%,*">


<frame name="top" src="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/" noresize="noresize" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" />
<noframes> 
   <body>
   <p><i>This document uses a frameset.</i></p>    
   <p><a href="http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/">Click Here</a> to view the page.</p>
   </body>
</noframes>
</frameset>


Ok.. so off to Freeparking Help desk .. and their response


 


Subject: [WebFarm/Freeparking #1400011] URL Redirection - xxxx.co.nz


 Hi ,  There's no good answer to that unfortunately. Cloaked wont show much in the way of filenames, or anything else, as you mentioned. You can really only cloak it or not cloak it.  -- Regards, Chris



So the choice is either show xxxx.co.nz on all pages or  forget the domain and wind up with urls like http://xxxx.12345.a.hostable.me/wordpress/be-involved/ .. so whats the point of the domain name???


There does not appear to be away around this apart from:



  1. Host the site with freeparking or

  2. register the domain name with someone else (though check if they also do cloaking the same way - I have been told godaddy does the same)


Any ideas welcome....


13-Aug: Suggestion from Inga - does require certain conditions to be met before this will work.  http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/frame-blocking-anti-clickjacking.shtml


 



2 comments:

  1. It sounds to me like you haven't set DNS up correctly, and instead you're using URL redirection (which in turn Freeparking are using an iFrame to achieve this). You should be using name servers that your web hosting provider gives you; as opposed to URL redirection. 

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  2. Thanks guys. You are right once we set up the correct dns in free parking to point to the servers on hostable it "almost" worked. Took some work by hostable's help desk to get it working but all sweet now.

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