ORANGEBLOG

This is a fast and dangerous new practice that ORANGEHAT is seeing on the internets: Website Framing. It’s been spawned from those URL shorteners for sites like Twitter, and has morphed into a nasty (and tricky) method of sharing links.

What happens is some websites (even some URL shorteners) take the link you’re sharing, and puts the site in their own (sometimes short) URL in place of the actual URL. Digg is the biggest and newest culprit to this deal, and since everyone else is upset with them, let’s use them as an example. Say something you’ve posted on your site it’s a hit, and someone posts it to Digg.com. If someone from Digg wants to view it, Digg provides them a short URL link like: www.digg.com/1234. The site then has a top header (or frame) and loads the site underneath of that, so you can view what you wanted. You’ve just viewed a framed site.

Here’s the rub though. And there’s two biggies. One: Site traffic is not making it to your site. People finding your article through digg’s short URL, aren’t actually going to your page, but Digg’s. Because of the frame, Digg gets the hits you should be getting. The second thing plays off the first. If you don’t get the hits, you don’t get the ad money from google (if you’re setup) – they do. The other sites are actually the ones making money because their site traffic has increased and then they call sell more ad space. That hurts businesses like us, because we’re trying to drum up traffic, and they get all the credit. It’s turning the internet into a big business: the workers bust ass, but the bosses get and take all the credit. And that’s just not right.

Now this is not to say all URL shorteners are bad – because they’re not. Any Short URL service that serves as a URL redirect (and that’s the key part) is fine. Granted these kind of services still need some work, and services like Twitter should provide their own solutions, but all-in-all, the idea is decent.

This new epidemic is getting out of hand and hurting the places that are serving up the content for these larger sites to share. Daring Fireball has a lot of methods to help let you block sites from using framework (mostly Diggbar, unsure if they work for all).

Fight the Frames. If you see a frame when you click a link – click out of it and get redirected, like you should be, and make sure your traffic counts and gets where it should be. Avoid services that use it whenever possible. Make the internet a safe and speedy place to find information, and let everyone get their share of the pie.

Repeat after me: Frames are bad. Frames are bad.

All together now!: Frames are bad. Frames are….