The Pros and Cons of Source Code Encryption
...is Webpage Locking the solution to site hijacking, image and source code theft?
– by Stephen Mahaney

Since the topic of encryption is such a hot subject of late, it's appropriate that we address the issue of source code locking and how that affects rankings in the engines.

Locking the source code of an entire web page sounds attractive for reasons of preventing page and site hijackings, theft of optimized code, and image larceny. The question is, does solving these problems cause other, bigger problems.

Shooting flies with a shotgun?

One of the most popular programs for locking source code is WeblockPro. The magic is accomplished by using javascript encryption that converts whole pages into lines of code that cannot be seen by using the View | Source method.

Does it work? ...yes, no, and maybe. It depends on what you are looking to accomplish. It does, in fact, prevent a visitor from viewing (and stealing) the source code. In some cases, however, this strategy is a bit like shooting a fly with a shotgun. You may succeed in stopping the fly but the scattershot trades an annoyance for a bona fide mess of unintended consequences.

What's at issue for most optimizers is that the encryption also keeps the SE spiders from "seeing" the source code too. That means that engines will have trouble indexing the page. The workaround relies on using the <noscript>put SE indexable text here</noscript> tags to generate indexable text that is viewable to the spiders and (presumably) relevant to the content of the "cloaked" source code of the page as it is displayed by the browser.

Of course, this is conceivably open to abuse since there is no guarantee that the actual page content matches the relevance of the text found within the <noscript></noscript> tags.

What kinds of pages could benefit from being locked?

Regardless, there are times when such encryption makes sense. A prime example might be an online image gallery. Locking the code would hide the image-pat...