Reverse-proxy to hide iframe origin. How does that work?

Question

Somebody told me to use a reverse proxy to make iframe content relevant for the website embedding it. But I can't get my head around how would that work?

As I understand it, I would need a reverse proxy for every client-website using the iframe, to make the iframe appear to be coming from the client-websites-domain.

But since I only have access to the server delivering the iframe and not the different servers hosting the client-websites, I can't see how that should work. Or am I getting something wrong and it is possible with a proxy in front of the delivering-machine?

Answer 1

I think your logic is sound. If you only have access to the server providing the iframe content, I don't see how you can run a reverse proxy. I can see the client website going to for example, localhost:3000, and have nginx or something reroute that to your server, but without access to the client server I don't see how you can do that.

The only other idea I have is, do you have access to the DNS of these client websites? In something like CloudFlare, I believe you can basically do a reverse DNS with page rules. For example, clientwebsite.com has an iframe for clientwebsite.com:3000. This goes through CloudFlare, which redirects this to your iframe website. I've never tested this before though, just an idea.

Answer 2

I would recommend switching from iFrame to JavaScript widgets to write this content into other sites. Rather than give other sites code for an iFrame:

<iframe src="https://example.com/some-cool-content.html"></iframe> 

you could give other sites a JavaScript snippet that would write that data into the page:

<script src="https://example.com/some-cool-content.js"></script>

Googlebot now renders the JavaScript on many of the pages on the web. Data written into the pages, even from third party sites counts as content on that page.