Australian Financial Review - Digital Rights Management and SEO
One of the guys here at work today (Anthony) visited the Australian Financial Review website www.afr.com.au. Anthony was reading one of their articles, and as is his want, was highlighting the page copy as he was reading.
He noticed the page text was 'switching out' every second character. It's probably best explained with some screenshots (I love screen shots). Here's the normal version of the site.
The next screen shot shows what happens if you swipe the text (to try and copy it):
Try it yourself here
This is a html form of Digital Rights Management. For the more technically minded, basically what AFR has done is use two floating div tags each containing every second character, which, when overlayed make the text read normally. It's only when you swipe the text that the system comes into play, because you're just swiping one layer.
It potentially creates a strain on your server as it's working hard putting the whole thing together each time a page is called. It would also send your bandwidth through the roof!
It also has it's SEO pros and cons, so lets go through the implications if you decide to protect your content with this system.
1. This technique is SEO unfriendly!
If we take a sneak peak at the source code, there's no way Google's going to index this page effectively.
Ever.
Here's an example of the source code:
I don’t think google will like this… (or any other search engine for that matter)
If you don't want your content in Google's index, use a robots.txt file to keep the Googlebot out (very useful for subscriber / members only content).
And given the way that Google handles duplicate content (it gives gives first 'dibs' to the web page where the Googlebot first found unique content and ignores any other page with the same or highly similar content), I don't really see the point in using this system.
To make sure your content gets indexed first, set up a xml sitemap in Google webmaster tools, and make sure that when you publish something new, Google knows about it seconds after it's gone live.
In other words, even if someone else copied and published AFR content on their website or Blog, Google would simply ignore it.
Besides... it's easy to steal content. Ever heard of a 'screengrab'? (see above!).
2. This is a usability disaster. Not everyone online can see.
Beth (a collegue) also chipped in... What happens when someone with a screen reader comes through? They get this:
A s r l a n N w e l n B n i g r u f u m x d h m r e b f r C r s m s i h s r t g p e e t t o p o l i i g h t h b n 's s a b s n s w u d r w o 0 e c n o p o i s n i e e r . F o 7 e c n t d y. e t e e a n m j r c u s t o o t e o i o a d o e x s i g u i e s s o l e e b s l .
Mmmm.
Finally, one of our clever developers spent 10 minutes to create a script which renders the whole AFR digital rights 'thing' useless. Sorry, we won't be offering that for download!
Do you have any other thoughts?
He noticed the page text was 'switching out' every second character. It's probably best explained with some screenshots (I love screen shots). Here's the normal version of the site.
The next screen shot shows what happens if you swipe the text (to try and copy it):
Try it yourself here
This is a html form of Digital Rights Management. For the more technically minded, basically what AFR has done is use two floating div tags each containing every second character, which, when overlayed make the text read normally. It's only when you swipe the text that the system comes into play, because you're just swiping one layer.
It potentially creates a strain on your server as it's working hard putting the whole thing together each time a page is called. It would also send your bandwidth through the roof!
It also has it's SEO pros and cons, so lets go through the implications if you decide to protect your content with this system.
1. This technique is SEO unfriendly!
If we take a sneak peak at the source code, there's no way Google's going to index this page effectively.
Ever.
Here's an example of the source code:
I don’t think google will like this… (or any other search engine for that matter)
If you don't want your content in Google's index, use a robots.txt file to keep the Googlebot out (very useful for subscriber / members only content).
And given the way that Google handles duplicate content (it gives gives first 'dibs' to the web page where the Googlebot first found unique content and ignores any other page with the same or highly similar content), I don't really see the point in using this system.
To make sure your content gets indexed first, set up a xml sitemap in Google webmaster tools, and make sure that when you publish something new, Google knows about it seconds after it's gone live.
In other words, even if someone else copied and published AFR content on their website or Blog, Google would simply ignore it.
Besides... it's easy to steal content. Ever heard of a 'screengrab'? (see above!).
2. This is a usability disaster. Not everyone online can see.
Beth (a collegue) also chipped in... What happens when someone with a screen reader comes through? They get this:
A s r l a n N w e l n B n i g r u f u m x d h m r e b f r C r s m s i h s r t g p e e t t o p o l i i g h t h b n 's s a b s n s w u d r w o 0 e c n o p o i s n i e e r . F o 7 e c n t d y. e t e e a n m j r c u s t o o t e o i o a d o e x s i g u i e s s o l e e b s l .
Mmmm.
Finally, one of our clever developers spent 10 minutes to create a script which renders the whole AFR digital rights 'thing' useless. Sorry, we won't be offering that for download!
Do you have any other thoughts?
Labels: Australian Financial Review, black hat seo, digital rights management, Google, html, screen readers, usablility
posted by Chris Thomas - Reseo at
16:30
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