Hidden Keywords

Hiding keywords on your web page

[seaman]

I stumbled accross a script which claims it can hide/ or just display gibberish for your keywords when a visitor right clicks and views your source code. It kinda makes sense, but is that really necessary, or am I being naive? Are lots of people out there doing it - making an effort to conceal their keywords from their competitors?

Seaman

[Robert Charlton]

Are lots of people out there doing it - making an effort to conceal their keywords from their competitors?

Anyone looking at your site who knows what they're doing can generally figure out what it might rank for without looking at the meta keywords tag.

The keywords tag is disregarded by almost all major search engines, and its usefulness has been in question for years. So there's nothing magic about it, and it's really not worth any great effort to conceal it.

[gmoney]

I avoid handing certain keywords to competitors on a silver platter by simply not including them in the meta tags (small or no price to pay with respect to SEO and very convenient if you are lazy). For example, if I am targeting following keywords on a page: red widget, red widget services, deluxe red widget, red widget sample, red widget information, affordable red widget etc. then in my meta tag I will just put: “red widget” so that competition thinks you are simply targeting red widget (which they probably already know about) and then moves on without examining your page in detail.

Note: If I saw somebody scrambling meta keywords I would be very curious about what “valuable” information are trying to hide and look at various things (on-page/off-page) to see all the keywords they were actually targeting which, as Robert points out, is not hard to do if you are looking for it. Besides, I prefer to stay away from giving robots different content than viewers.

[Mohamed_E]

If a competitor thinks that "stealing" your meta keywords will help him or her, then that is not a very dangerous competitor :)

[gmoney]

If a competitor thinks that "stealing" your meta keywords will help him or her, then that is not a very dangerous competitor :)

If you are referring to someone who copies a high ranking pages meta keywords and then steals them verbatim for their own meta keywords thinking that it will help their rankings then I would agree that they are not much competition.

However, if a competent webmaster with basic SEO skills and lots of PageRank is thinking about adding some new content to their site then I don’t want to give up all my keyword gems in the meta tags to help seed their keyword research (Note: I believe wordtracker’s lateral search feature uses related websites meta tags to help seed peoples keyword research).

Many people, including myself, go through considerable effort trying to find the best keywords with wordtracker, overture tool, looking at referral logs, tracking conversion rates, and yes, occasionally checking out what the competition is targeting.

[seaman]

Thanks, everyone :)

[SuzziJ]

Sorry guys, but just going back to the original question. Let's look at the fundamental flaw shall we: Any script that hides either the meta tags or the body text from a visitor is also hiding the exact same information from the search engines. So regardless of whether a competitor might steal the "code", why would they want to? Because the site hiding the code is highly, and I do mean highly unlikely to ever get a good ranking because the search engine will not have anything to spider. Get it? You know you do.

[jbinbpt]

This thread is from yesterday. Poster was worried that his trademarks were hidden in meta tags
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