Forum Moderators: open
I guess my approach is to try to optimize all of the internal pages, get tons of links and hope for the best.
If he doesn't want ANY metas on the site, I think I'll send him down the river, cause I'm not sure I want to deal with a client link that.
Any other ideas?
One of my SEO clients has a problem with his competition stealing his source code and using what he does to drive traffic to their sites. As a result the client has locked out access to the source code on his homepage, and that by default includes the bots.
Snicker, snicker... Tis' a rather futile approach at preventing content theft. If the content can be viewed at the browser level, then anyone with a little bit of knowledge can get it. All most would need to do is save a copy to their desktop.
METAs? Not really a big deal but they do add to the overall equation. If your client is worried about someone stealing the metadata, then I might suggest counseling of some sort. ;)
Personally, I'd pass on this one. If the client is adamant about trying to hide source and/or other data that is viewable at the browser level, then that is probably one of many hurdles you'll be facing.
I'm the guy that gets chunks of my site lifted 5-6 times a year minimum that I even catch and I'm not going to those extremes, it's just not worth the amount of time and energy when you can do more positive things to the site. It's a fruitless fight in my opinion, having beaten down and vanquished most that would do me harm (so far), i recommend you just keep your head down, play by the rules and focus your energy on improving your site while the wannabes are one step behind playing catch up.
My net result was the wannabes started losing steam and I'm monitoring their steady decline as I don't think they have a clue what happened after my last SEO pass hit google and they took a major traffic hit.
You can probably hammer them with the DMCA if you set a nice baited trap. If they are in fact copying your stuff 100% verbatim and not changing a thing, simply take a snapshot of a couple of pages from their site and your site they day before you make the changes, then do it again AFTER you make the changes when they copy the information. Just drop a nice DMCA letter including PDFs or screen shots of their theft to them and their web host and stand back to watch the sparks fly.
erm am i being dumb here, but i'm not entirely sure what yo mean by this, surely no-one will be able to see the page at all.
why don't they just cloak the pages, that way the source seen by the competitor isn't that seen by the engines.
Why don't they just cloak the pages.
That won't work either. Anything that can be viewed at the browser level is free for the taking. The more technologically aware person could easily find the cloaked content, it is not a difficult procedure. ;)
I'd axe the subject of hiding content altogether, it really isn't an option unless of course you decide to cloak. That will keep some of them out of there but then you add another element of maintenance and possibly some associated risks.
So that's your solution.
Grab the source to Mozilla (it's an open source project, so no worries there provided you stick to their licensing).
Modify it to create a browser that uses public key encryption between the server and the browser (so the source cannot be stolen while passing through proxies and other downstream stages).
Remove all code that allows a user to view or save a page.
Now all you need to do is persuade the users that your site is so valuable to them (and you trust them so little) that they need to use your browser to access it.
You may find other people want to do what you are doing and, before you know it, you are the hub of a USD10e9 business providing browser resources for other protective website owners.
There'd be a session key (perhaps changed each message pair) between the browser and the server. I can provide more details on a contract basis if SEOMike wants to follow up this idea.
Of course, anyone could turn on a debugger and step through the machine code to find the HTML and/or keys. Games programs have pretty good internal protection for that sort of thing, so get a games programmer onboard too.
Security is an expensive business. But, if SEOMike's client wants it, it can be done.
I could do the same with a webpage, ot even "steal" it by printing it out or pointing a camera at the screen.
But that doesn't get me the source which is what thequestion is about. Any more than copying a DVD gets Tom Cruise to work for me on my next project.
Ultimately, what SEOMike's client wants is possible. The question is how much money he wants to pay, and how may visitors he's happy to lose.
All most would need to do is save a copy to their desktop.
That's what I thought too, but it didn't give me the default page code. It gave me all the images on the page, but no source code. He's pretty clever.
Here's a good questions then... how effective would it be to leave the "code lock" in place on the homepage and try to add T, D & K to the internal pages. IF he goes for it that is. The internal pages are not locked down, and are indexed by the SEs.
It'd be interesting to see what happens with PR too.
You'd have to be able to keep the IP addresses up to date, but wouldn't it be difficult to spoof an IP address?
