There are services out there that allow you to buy a site for your company, with the content already provided. You see this often with insurance brokerage sites, as well as many other industries. Often, these services are provided via a HTML frame technology. Let me explain, you have your domain name at www.domain.com, at the top of the page is your header that says "My Company, LLC." Under the header is a framed window with content provided by the third party company, hosted on a domain outside of yours. This is an SEO nightmare, and is a current issue at a thread in our forums named A major seo headache. Donna describes the problem;
1. They completely changed the site, so that now the 30,000+ pages that were indexed now show as 404's.2. Their new site is in frames.
3. The frame with the content is located on a different domain.
4. The frame with the content is on a secure server (https://), but as far as I know, there are no cookies, session id's or password protection involved.
So what can you do? I have seen the issue in the past, what we have done was deployed a spidering and scraping tool to pull the content the client is paying for off the external domain name. It then reposts the content on a static looking HTML page, under the client's own domain name. You may run into period issues with the site being slow or the scraper failing, but overall, this solution works well. You can do the content scraping manually if the page count is low but if it is a huge product database, you will need to deploy some automated solution to this technique.
Forum discussion at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
