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Framed redirects are one of my biggest pet peeves on the web. You click on a link to visit a site, the site loads, and the URL in your address bar is different than what it should be.
Technically, a framed redirect works by loading a hidden framed page on top of a second framed page which displays the target content.
Imagine clicking on a link for Amazon, pulling up the Amazon website, but seeing the URL amazonblackhataffiliate.com in your address bar. You would be able to browse the entire Amazon site, make purchases, etc. but the URL in the browser bar would always display amazonblackhataffiliate.com. This is the experience of surfing a site through a framed redirect.
As a publisher this can be very frustrating. For starters, while your website is being viewed, some other URL is displayed in the address bar. Not only can this confuse visitors, but it can also rob you of valuable links.
To make matters worse, if you have secure pages and the hidden frame is not secure, the visitor will not see the secure icon activated in their browser. This may lead your visitors to believe that your conversion process is not secure.
In my opinion, from a publisher’s point of view framed redirects are just bad news.
Recently a coworker of mine (Phil Molter) came up with a little snippet of javascript which essentially breaks framed redirects. The code has been tested across multiple browser versions and as of the time of this posting didn’t cause any errors. The script works by stopping framed redirects when the page loads by forcing the page to reload without the hidden frame.
The end result is that the visitor sees the correct URL in the address bar and the hidden frame is gone.
There are a lot of tutorials showing how to create framed redirects for various purposes, but I wanted to share this little bit of knowledge with other publishers to help them keep sketchy webmasters from hijacking their customers’ address bars. Good luck!
