Preventing Page-Jacking

This is an issue that was brought to light recently by a prospective customer. He was lamenting how an overseas "unauthorized" distributor had page-jacked the manufacturer's web site pages to put at his site and his site is actually ranking higher than the manufacturer's site. Naturally, the manufacturer wanted to know why the other site - with his own pages was ranking higher than his site. The answer is quite simple, but it's not the subject of this article - briefly, however, the page jacker also "optimized" the manufacturer's pages to account for the higher ranking.

My concern was in the fact that the competitor was able to grab the pages to begin with. I routinely grab site pages for clients to be reworked or redesigned and it's been very handy having that ability. However, I can see a need here to protect web site pages and it can be done. In fact, I've known how to do it for some time, I just didn't realize that there might be such a need.

While there's no way to make pages 100% foolproof from page jacking, you can make it pretty difficult for page jackers. With the use of "invisible frames" and JavaScript the page-jacker can find it quite frustrating to try to grab a page. If they do "file-->save as" they end up saving a frame page that is written in JavaScript every time - no matter what page they're looking at. If they try to right click to save a page or download a graphic, they get a message that says "that's not allowed at this site." If they try to view source code - which can only be viewed on the first page - they see a message that says, "This site is protected by international copyright laws. No part of this site can be used without the express written permission of the site owner."

Now, thwarting the page-jacker also sets up some barriers for search engines indexing your site. So, to get around that problem, we submit an interior site page to the search engines instead of your main page which is an invisible frame page. The interior page can be a site map or the real first page with content on it. From this page, the search engines will simply ignore the JavaScript and crawl the links to index your site.

Sites hosted at Thomas Register can only utilize some of the security measures we implement - not all of them because of Thomas Register site rules. While Thomas Register will not allow frames, we can still put in place the "no right click" script which will prevent people from right clicking to grab graphics from your site.

Securing your site can be a bit costly. Writing all the scripting for your pages is time consuming - but well worth it if you feel your site can become victim to competitors or unauthorized distributors. If you would like an estimate on the cost to secure your existing site, please email us and we will be happy to submit a free estimate for the work.