Encryption of HTML code

good or bad?

[Fryman]

Well, I am almost finished with my new website. As I have no knowledge of PHP and just a bit of HTML, it has taken me hours and hours sitting in front of my computer. I was thinking of doing some encryption to the HTML code, since I don't want my work to be stolen, but I was wondering if this would cause any problems with the search engine spìders. How can they crawl a code with encryption? Is there another way to protect my page allowing my site to be indexed and crawled by spiders?

[jbinbpt]

Hi Fryman,

There are various methods that will encrypt your html and/or make it harder to read. There is no method that will do this 100 percent. At best you will slow down someone looking at your code.

If there were only one spider for all the indexing engines, you might have a shot of having your site properly indexed. Since there are more that one spider and SE, then your chances of being properly indexed are slim at best.

The chances of rendering properly in all browsers are also slim, since the code is harder for the browser to read.

From the business side, when I get asked for links, I visit the site and one of the things I do is view the source code. I’m going to think hard about linking to a site that I don’t understand the SEO practices of.

jb

[Fryman]

So I guess I'll just leave it like it is... but would you suggest compressing the HTML code? Does it really help improving your website's speed? Won't this hurt the spider's crawling also?

[txbakers]

html encryption - useless

[Fryman]

And HTML compression?