Anti-Code Napping
How to protect your meta tags efficiently from snooping competitors with only two lines of code
(rt) It is a well accepted fact that correct handling of meta tag entries may fundamentally decide on whether your search engine positioning will top or flop. Analysing the meta tags codes of competing sites ranked above yours has become a daily routine for every sales aware webmaster: after all, you can't know it all, and the search engines tend to modify and sophisticate their ranking algorithms more or less all the time. What this boils down to is that you will have to keep updated all the time if you want to avoid losing contact.
Unfortunately, there will always people who want to have it all for free and who will not even shy away from downright criminal acts. This includes the theft of codes, which is technically very easy to effect: the competitor's successful page will be downloaded, meta tags and keyword entries relentlessly copied into the perpretator's own page. Finally, the new pirated web page is re-submitted to the search engines in its optimized version — and there goes weeks and months of meta tags fine tuning!
Suddenly, your search engine entry will experience a downslide while your unethical competitor's pages will climb to the top. So off you go once more, optimizing and re-optimizing your pages, resubmitting them, only to be imitated by the copycat, etc. And if there are more than two parties involved (e. g. when someone else starts copying your code pirating competitor), the vicious cycle may well continue and escalate ad nauseam.
What's worse: in actual practice it can be extremely difficult if not downright impossible to prove such infringement of your copyright as a base for court action. After all, your foe can replace the pirated code with a less controversial version after achieving an optimized search engine positioning. Alternatively, they may go for wholesale cloaking technology in the first place, i. e. employing phantom pages (also termed “stealth”, “food” or “cloaking” pages) you will never get to see in your web browser — meaning that you won't be able to download and analyse them for proof of infringement.
Paranoia? Not so! This is actually happening all the time, and the more competitive internet commerce is turning, the worse it will predictably get. So you will be well advised to take it seriously and prepare as best you can against such nefarious practices.
On the positive side, it is actually quite uncomplicated to protect your web site against meta tag code napping, at least against 90% of all common browsers. The following trick, while little known, can effect a high degree of efficiency with very little effort.
A small experiment
Let's conduct a small experiment before explaining the further procedure: this will effectively demonstrate the effect we want to achieve.
Please take a peek at this page's source code. For beginners, here are some tips covering the most common web browsers:
- INTERNET EXPLORER Click right mouse button and select “Show source code” in the context menu with left button. A Notepad window will open displaying this page's source code.
- NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR/COMMUNICATOR Click right mouse button and select “View source” in the context menu with left button. A browser window will open displaying this page's source code.
- OPERA Click right mouse button and select “Frame” in the context menu with left button. In next menu window select “View Source” and activate by clicking left mouse button. A window with your pre-configured text editor will open (default is Windows Write), displaying this page's source code.
Now, have a look at the first lines of the source code. You will find a message there.
For your convenience, find the complete header text displayed in the text area field below.
You might want to copy this and compare it with the text from page 2.
You will notice that we have created a proprietary, fictive meta tag named “testtext” containing the message you can see in the source code.
As you can see for yourself — not a trace of meta tags or any other header entries for that matter unless explicitly specified for perusal!
Note It won't make any difference whether you read the source code online or whether you download it for viewing offline — the meta tag code will remain hidden, the browser will not be able to read it and will therefore not download it either.
On the following page we will show you what you have missed — and, of course, how you can employ this technique yourself to protect your valuable code.
To take advantage of this procedure you must be able to make use of Server Side Includes (SSI) on your web server. If you don't know what SSIs are, please inquire with your web service provider who will normally be able to either provide you with relevant documentation or refer you to such.
Note IIS/4.0 users: The code presented here is an extended SSI expression which is not supported under IIS/4.0.
You will also require ftp access to your server; in some cases, telnet access (a “Unix shell account”) may be required as well. Again, your web service provider will be able to help you with this.
If you don't have such access or if you prefer not to adjust your system yourself, you can either ask your web service provider or employ an agency to do it for you. In any case you will have to either upload a file named .htaccess into the pertinent server directory or modify an existing version of same. Further on we will explain the code to be integrated into this file.
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