Stop “Protect” Texts

Texts for people?

Google representatives constantly insists that the content should be written for people, not for search engines. If SEO specialists took this recommendation into consideration, then it clearly passed by the attention of webmasters and site owners. Indeed, what do they have in common with optimizers? The webmaster only provides a channel for user interaction with the site. However, when it comes to “protecting” content from potential competitors, it is the webmaster who becomes responsible for the complexity of copying. In turn, the owner of the resource often underestimates the direct harm that any such protection brings.

All further information is based on the personal experience of the author. This is not a scientific study.

Techniques

There are many scripts and solutions that allow you to restrict copying texts from a resource. Perhaps the most trivial is adding Javascript:

oncopy="return false;" 

As a result, copying is simply canceled, and the buffer remains with the previous contents. Often, the right button on the page is also blocked so that such dirty tricks are not quickly annihilated by editing the source code of the page:

 oncontextmenu="return false;" 

These techniques have a terrible effect on users who have come just to use the site. Neither throw a piece of text or an interesting detail to a friend or friend, nor click on the pictures - it is completely user-friendly. In especially neglected cases, even pressing the buttons of the keyboard is blocked, turning the page scrolling into real hell.
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Transparent images, stretched across the width of the block, are also still in use, although they do not allow to follow links in the text.

A rarer, but relatively honest method is to clear the selection:

 onselectstart="return false" 

The user immediately sees that the copy will not succeed, and does not spend his time trying.

For a while, scripts that turned the contents of the buffer into porridge were popular. Of course, this deception leaves a nasty sediment, and it is highly doubtful that with such a swine resource behavior the user will once again return to it.

Over time, more friendly forms of protection have been developed, but already, rather, copyright, than the content itself. For example, copying news snippets on SearchEngines.ru goes smoothly - at the end of the text only a link to the source code and a suggestion to follow are added. In some implementations, adding text to the end destroys the formatting (paragraph division) of the copied section, but this rarely becomes a problem.

There is little protection without using JS. The author was able to detect only the css hack, reversing the order of the letters. In fact, a change in reading direction is used:

 .stopcopy {unicode-bidi: bidi-override; direction: rtl} 

Naturally, the content is also driven in in the reverse order. The advantage of this approach is obvious - turning off JS will not hurt to “protect” content. The minus is also visible to everyone - editing CSS is even easier.

Efficiency

Zero. Today there is hardly a person who works with IE6 or another browser that has no analogues NoScript and Custom CSS. Only two simple browser extensions nullify all the benefits of any method of protection, not to mention the cases when people familiar with programming are taken for the theft.

The impact on ordinary users is great. I don’t always want to just throw a link to my friends - most often I want to add a couple of lines from the text to show what he is talking about. It is unlikely that the user will be interested in the motives - there will always be another, no less informative, source, and the person for this resource will be lost.

In the case of online stores it is still more banal - in many cases, users are not sharing links, but product characteristics. It is unlikely that the client will be satisfied with such protection systems, especially given that he has no idea about the importance of unique content.

Adding a link to the original at the end of the copied text is the optimal solution, in which both the wolves are fed and the sheep are intact. On the other hand, to the unenlightened, such protection may seem completely useless.

Conclusion

Enough, you need to work on the old technology! Yandex and Google do advertise their technology to confirm authorship, and their effectiveness is quite high. Yes, cases where this approach was not justified have already been observed, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Write texts for people, not for the site. Attackers will be able to copy them anyway, and it will be very difficult to get them lost due to paranoid security systems and an inconvenient user interface.