How can you Hide Metatags?

[grease]

Hi,
I am know this came up in the forum once before, but after 20 minutes of searching I give up :)

Google aside, I need to know how to protect my metatags from pretators. Several of our clients are having their entire metatags and titles stolen - giving competitors undeserved advantages.

I was informed that it was impossible to completely hide the these tags without preventing the search engine robots from recognizing them. I am looking for the best way to make the tags invisable to a person. Any magicians out there?

Grease

[Christian_SEO]

I can only think of two possible ways:

1)Cloaking or IP delivery. This is generally used to get an unfair advantage in the search engines, but it has legit uses like you mention.

2)It might be possible to find a good JavaScript programmer who could write something to erase or change the tags after the page has been loaded into the browser. Search engines do not run any JS, so they should see that tags as always.

Personally, I would not worry about it. I would have a copyright notice on the page and in the meta tags. If they copy everything and you think it's help them, then have a lawyer write a letter or sue them. They can't exactly copy the meta tags anymore than they can copy the page itself.

But since your page content should be different then theirs, the tags are not going to work the same on their site as the do on yours. Even if they copy your pages exactly, it's still not going to be the same due to domain name and linking...

[grease]

True, page content may not be exactly the same, but very similar for some products. A Copyright notice will do little to prevent a start-up from snatching your code and running with it. Even if you do present your case, they can easily switch up the tags at any point. I can see things being a little easier when the tags include Company names, trademarked slogans, etc...but these are general product names, adjectives, and phrases. If you did catch the criminal, you are still not dealing with the root of the problem - you are wide open to the next guy.
From what I understand Google does not respond well to cloaking tactics. What do you mean by IP delivery? I will look into the Javascript, Thanks for your advice!

Grease

[Whit]

I have noticed that most of the bots don't send a referrer. If it is true in all cases then you could minimize the exposure of your tags by testing the referrer. If it is blank then you would have a search engine and would be safe to show the tags.
This would cause a problem for bots that do send referrers though. Also, if the person stripping your tags is doing it on a large scale then they are very likely to be using some home grown script to do it. The script will probably not send a referrer either.
Still, if none of the spiders send the referrer then this would at least minimize the exposure of your tags.

Just an idea.

[cooper]

Hi Grease,
Christian_SEO has some good possible ways to help "cloak" your precious tags, but the truth is you will never be able to fully hide anything from anyone if you publish it on a web site. The JavaScript option is viable only for those users that run JavaScript. One can always turn that off in one's preferences or use another device to sniff out the page with the precious data. Another thing is that Google (at least at this time) totally disregards the META tags in creating its index.

If you are still hungry for a way to hide those tags here is one that gets many people and doesn't require anything fancy. Just add about fifty lines of whitespace (line returns) above your HTML source code. I was surprised how many people don't scroll down when viewing source.

Good luck and let us know if you find anything that works!

[Teri Hanes]

Hello Grease,

I have utilized Weblock Pro for this purpose on several of my client sites and it works beautifully. Just be sure you have a back-up copy of your site first, with all of your displayed meta's, because once you apply this program they are gone. The cool thing is that it does not affect the search engines or spiders at all. You can read more about it here: http://www.weblockpro.com/home.php

Hope this helps.
______________________________
Teri Hanes, Web Developer, Programmer
http://www.hanes-originals.com

[cooper]

I have utilized Weblock Pro for this purpose on several of my client sites and it works beautifully. Just be sure you have a back-up copy of your site first, with all of your displayed meta's, because once you apply this program they are gone. The cool thing is that it does not affect the search engines or spiders at all. You can read more about it here: http://www.weblockpro.com/home.php

If they have used their own product on their web site it doesn't protect the META and TITLE tags at all, which is what I think Grease was looking for. Just view source and scroll to the right place:

<meta name="description" content="Get FREE code to secure your web page from thieves, and discover the little webmaster's mistake that could suddenly cost you $1000's of dollars if it's not fixed! Breakthrough technology finally puts an end to web site theft, enabling you to...">
<meta name="keywords" content="encrypt html, no right click, no view source, javascript encryption, web site encryption, web site security, mike chen, weblock, weblock pro">

I also got some sort of weird dialog box that asked if I wanted the site to be able to access data on my clipboard?!? And no matter if I clicked yes or no, the dialog box would not go away. Weird, no? I ended up using another browser to check it out.

[mediahound]

I have to agree with Terri on this one.
According to your replies, the IP scripting is most likely not going to be your soluton of choice.
You had asked for more info on that, and no one has touched it yet, so basically, in a nut shell, it has to do with the known ip's of the bots. All bots have an ip block or sole number allocated to them. There are known ranges, so when a visitor arrives from one of these numbers, your server will know its a bot, and therefore serve the spider what it needs to index. You have full control over what ip gets what data.
Without getting into that, the most efficient way to protect your source code in general, not only your meta tags, would be to use Mike Chen's WebLockPro
Here's the link to it: Web Lock Pro
Also worth posting, I have a software to do just the opposite, its called the View Source Software. The link to that is here:View Source Software
It lets you view the source of most pages, but it will not decode Web Lock Pro's script.
Well, Happy Holidays to everyone near and far.
- Jarred

[spiderbait]

I'm also interested in this topic and will be watching this thread to see what people have to say about it.

I looked into this a few weeks ago, but the problem of code theft has been ongoing for several years for a few of my clients and aside from the difficulty of pursuing legal recourse, it's also just a very stressful thing and has left my clients feeling violated.

We would like to come up with something that balances protection from the average thief/snooper with visibility for the search engines.

I found this site ...

http://fantomaster.com/fasmbacntut01a.html


... with the suggestion to use server side includes that will parse regular html files and delete selected text based on the user agent... effectively hiding whatever source code you choose from whatever browser you choose.

It makes sense, but I wonder what affect it would have on the search engines. I'm thinking about running a test. Has anyone else tested this?

Might it work?

[B Noble]

I wouldn't worry about it. It's very common for the unethical to lift just about anything they can get their mouse on from a website. Feel lucky that your metas were the only thing stolen. We've had our entire website copied many times. That's easy to pursue as copyright infringement but metas would be very difficult to prove and honestly not worth the time or money to do so. If it's out there for all to see, there will always be those unethical few who do not have the ability to come up with their own work so they steal whatever they can. You cannot control what others do and will drive yourself nutZ trying.