In order to see a live preview of another website that users link to on my website, I'm using iframes.
However, this is probably not the best solution, as a website is loaded directly into mine, with every JavaScript element etc that is on the linked page.
My question: how dangerous is it to do such a thing? What is the worst case scenario that could happen? Could a linked site just by using JavaScript (or other technologies) do any serious harm to my site or my user's data?
And then, the second part of my question is, of course, about the website preview.
All I found so far are scripts that contain more than one php and js file in order to load a website preview picture.
Isn't there an easier way to do this? What do you suggest?
how dangerous is it to do such a thing?
Some websites do not like to be embedded using frames. Such websites can possibly take over the full browser by ensuring it is loaded in the topmost window. Aside from that, as long as your website and the website you are loading aren't from the same domain, they won't be able to access your cookies, DOM etc. So its pretty safe in that respect.
about the website preview
There aren't many fool proof mechanisms other than generating the preview image server side - as I believe the scripts you've seen do.
Related
I've made a tool take people can use and its made in Javascript.
They generate the code and then paste it into their webpage code.
I am just wondering how would I go about making it work in forum posts, or other site posts or do the websites normally block this sort of thing?
Would it be possible to convert it for social media sites also? Like have it so the users can interact with it inside posts? Thanks!
So first a warning: DO NOT DO THIS THE WAY THAT YOU HAVE IT RIGHT NOW
You are forcing people to inject a script directly into their website directly from your servers. This script sets and users global variables and can break other things. I would be very very angry if someone added something like this to a site I ran. For example your script creates a function called clicked() in the global scope. What if the site already had a function named that on it? Then all of a sudden that site breaks. It is possible to do this without these issues (see how twitter buttons work for example) but it still has limitations.
Doing this in the way you have it set up looks to another site exactly like an XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attack so no, you cannot do this in forums/etc - they specifically disallow it.
Occasionally a forum might allow iframes (they have much better security for the including site). In your case using iframes would actually be a much cleaner solution. Simply have them include an iframe that points to your site. Your site then (using php, .Net, node, perl, whatever server scripting language you want) would reply with the markup that you want. You can pass the parameters you want as parameters in your url.
I've got a complex page that can be customized and should be embedded in some clients' websites. For each client it should look the same, but the parameters can be little different. The page also contains a custom object that uses a plugin in the browser.
I had 2 idea to accomplish this:
Using an iFrame - so I just embed my page and pass parameters in the
querystring.
Using a remote JS file - like Facebook SDK and others
work. Passing parameters in the JS code. As I understand, I can just put some 'parent' div on the page and the remote JS file, which should fill the parent div with the needed elements.
Which one should I use? What are the cons / pros of each one?
Thanks!
Take a look at this article which has an in depth look into the ways of what you're trying to achieve.
Pros of IFrame:
If the owner of the mashup page is really concerned with security, malicious scripts running in the widget, then the IFRAME approach is preferable, because the widget’s script will have limited access to the host page and hence couldn’t make much harm to the page where it's embedded into.
Also, this approach is preferable if the owner of the widget wants to control the layout and styling of his/her widget. Since the IFRAME is essentially a separate web page, the mashup’s CSS scripts can’t do much harm to the widget.
Cons:
it is slow, resource intensive [on the browser], and does not give the owner of the mashup page an ability to style the widgets the way s/he wants.
I've had similar issue some time ago. You bassicaly have three options to choose depending how secure and flexible your plugin should be.
iframe
pros
fairly secure - you can present data that should be viewed to specyfic user only and allow passing sensitive data to your service. Page that includes your plugin will not have access to it.
page that includes your iframe will not be able to modify it's content to confuse user
cons
slow
limited communication between your plugin and the page(may be solved by between-window post message/porthole, but this is not perfect)
page still may scam users into beliving they see your plugin, while present own copy or use click jacking
if you include any assets from 3-rd party server that bit of security you had is lost
limited to rectengular box
script
pros
extremly flexible
easy to implement variety of callbacks to react on events on the page
fast
may integrate with interface of the page in many different ways and spots
cons
basically can be modfited in any possible way by page that includes it. You have no controll what users will see in the end.
redirect through your service and then back
pros
most safe solution
cons
hardest to seamlessly integrate
may not interact with other elements of website that uses plugin(since when users see your plugin they are't seeing source website anymore)
Specifically, what I'm trying to do is create a mobile version of a site I don't have access to. The best approach I can think of is this:
My site executes their php search file and then displays the results page, but first modifies its DOM to use my CSS. Is it technically possible?
Your site can definitely access web content from another site, filter/transform it however it wants, and then forward the result wherever it wants. It is not a simple problem, potentially, as so much web content is dynamic. For example, if the source site has content that's formatted with CSS that's dynamically built by JavaScript, it'd be fairly difficult to come up with an automated transformation.
Whether the original site's owners will be happy about your site doing that is a separate issue.
I recently implemented a fix to create separate landing pages depending on whether or not the user has javascript enabled. Basically the way it works is this.
The default page is an HTML page w/ no javascript. Basic version of the site. Upon landing on it, there is a script that says if javascript is enabled then go to another page. That landing page is generated by sending the user request through a JSP file that renders the page (header, footer, etc.). The final landing page is http://whatever.com/home.jsp if the user has javascript enabled.
My question is if this will hurt SEO. Considering 99% of the world has javascript enabled I would hate to compromise any SEO benefit to accomodate the 1% who doesn't enable javascript.
Hope that make sense.
In general, searchbots should be treated as browsers with JS disabled. I think you can now imagine where they'll land.
This whole question is by the way completely unrelated to JSP. It is just a server side view technology which provides a template to write HTML/CSS/JS in and provides capabilities to control the page flow dynamically with taglibs and access backend data with EL. All what webbrowsers and bots sees (and thus all what counts for SEO) is its generated HTML output.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355
Short version, if your JS sends them to entirely different content, it's probably bad, and Google may give you a a hard time. Other than that, you should be good.
If the alternative version is an (almost) full-featured, full-content version, then it's perfectly OK.
Google even advices for making alternatives for Flash-only sites, for example, in regard to usability.
Read google FAQ
You touch two topics, one is described as "Cloaking", the other as "Duplicate Content". With "cloaking", you present different (optimized-with-bad-intention) content based upon identification of the client that accesses it, e.g. by inspecting the User-agent header (google-bot versus Browser). You are not doing this, you just want to present content in a way that suits your client best, like a redirect on a page optimized for mobile clients ("m.example.com").
The other thing is how to avoid duplicate content. There's a way by indicating the original content source with a canonical tag, see here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
There have been many debates about this topic already here, but none of them fully answered my question so I figured I would pose it and hope I get one or two decent answers.
We're planning on relaunching our company website in the next few months. Our current site, for the most part, is text-driven and because of this we rank very well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our primary keywords. We want to increase the "Wow Factor" of the site a bit (we're an interactive agency) but still maintain a majority of our search engine footing. The option to use Flash, AJAX, and other technologies that are not considered to be search engine friendly have come up numerous times in our meetings and each time we have to evaluate what kind of impact it would have on us from an SEO perspective.
Assuming a good portion of the site content will be encapsulated within a Flash (swf) file, what would be the best course of action for maintaining current rankings? I've read numerous times that Google indexes Flash files but I am unsure as to what extent. Further, is there a method of telling Google not to index a Flash file (through a variable or otherwise)?
Finally, I had an idea that seemed sound in theory and wanted to put it out into the world and see what type of feedback I receive on it:
Again, assuming the whole page is in a Flash file living on index.html, would it be possible to build out the site as normal (set up a logical directory structure, add content to static pages within said structure, etc), specify paths to those static pages in a Google XML Sitemap file, and have the spiders crawl only those pages (which are rich in content) while the user experiences some concoction of Flash/Javascript/AJAX/etc? If this works, what would be the pros/cons of this solution? Thanks for bearing with me on this slightly off-kilter question.
Well referencing Google I found that they have made impressive strides into indexing Flash based web pages. The only limitation I found from reading the article is that they are currently still limited in their ability in these three areas:
Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web
page loads a Flash file via
JavaScript, Google may not be aware of
that Flash file, in which case it will
not be indexed.
We currently do not attach content from external resources that are
loaded by your Flash files. If your
Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML
file, another SWF file, etc., Google
will separately index that resource,
but it will not yet be considered to
be part of the content in your Flash
file.
While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on
the web, currently there are
difficulties with Flash content
written in bidirectional languages.
Until this is fixed, we will be unable
to index Hebrew language or Arabic
language content from Flash files.
By the sounds of it you won't have any problems with any of the 3 'problems'. Based on this document Flash sounds like a viable option for you.
Adobe has been working on their end as well to accommodate the search engines in their stride to make SWFs more search engine friendly as well. So with the combined efforts of both Adobe and Google/Yahoo if you take a dip in ranking within a year or two the search algorithms will be better than they are even now.
As far as not indexing you should be able to add in a simple
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/
Disallow: /directory/page.html
to your robots.txt file.
Andrew,
I've had to deal with this sort of thing a few times and I'd recommend maintaining both a Flash site (for users) and an HTML site (for search engines). Here's how you do it:
With whatever server-side stuff you're using set up some kind of switch that determines whether a particular request is for HTML or for whatever your Flash movie consumes (XML, JSON, another SWF, whatever). Every page on your site should be able to return HTML and whatever you choose to feed your Flash movie. A query string parameter like "requestType=Flash" will work just fine.
Put all of the content in your HTML pages in a div tag and make the div invisible with CSS. Use SWFObject to check if the requesting browser supports Flash and, if it does, have SWFObject replace your HTML content with your Flash movie. Search engine spiders will ignore your scripts and simply crawl your HTML pages and if you'd like to show the HTML to users with browsers that don't support Flash (like mobile browsers), just make the HTML content visible after SWFObject has determined that the browser doesn't support Flash.
Once your Flash movie has loaded, have it request whatever data it needs from the server using the same URL of the page that it was loaded on, but with the addition of the switch variable above.
Handle navigation from that point on with SWFAddress. When a user clicks a button to request a new page, pass the request through SWFAddress first, which will update the browser history using the hash mark trick, and then have your Flash movie make its request to the server.
I'm currently working on a site for a friend that uses this technique here (I should note, to protect my pride, that the site is still very much a work in progress):
http://www.casabarbuenosaires.com/
A browser request to any page on the site will first return the HTML representation of that page (you can view source in your browser to see that). SWFObject then replaces the HTML content with a Flash movie that loads a custom XML description of the same page which the Flash movie then constructs and displays.
I've worked on sites in the past that have used this technique and gotten excellent search engine results. Since you don't need to worry too much about what your HTML site looks like to humans, you can focus solely on what it looks like to search engines.
Another added benefit of building your site this way is that you are compelled to separate your site's content/copy from its visual representation. Throwing your entire site into a single SWF is generally NOT a good way to do that. It's much easier to maintain (or re-skin or scrap) a site when your content isn't all mixed up with your code.
Hope this helps,
Scott