Image and Content Management

[KJ-Rodgers]

My boss has decided that on our new website we are building, that he wants all content and images managed by not allowing copying content and/or saving images.

Some of the information and images is proprietary, yet most is available for public viewing, but never the less, he wants it prohibited from copy and/or saving. We would still want to keep the content indexable and use appropriate alt tags etc...

I wanted to find out if there is any SEO reason and facts to why this would not be a good idea?Would implementing code to prohibit (or at least make it difficult) to save images and copy content, penalize us?

[RyanKent]

If your boss really feels there is a site which offers such protection, please share the URL. There are sites which may disable right-clicking but that only removes a single method of copying content.

[smstv]

I totally concur. You cant stop anyone from jacking your content, or graphics.

[KJ-Rodgers]

That was what I was thinking.

I knew it would be nearly impossible, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't out of the loop on something. I am pretty sure he seen a website that had text select disabled or something of that nature, but there is always works arounds. Thanks

[RyanKent]

Would implementing code to prohibit (or at least make it difficult) to save images and copy content, penalize us?

It is not possible to prevent content theft. Anyone who can read your content can copy it. The same applies to images. It is a mistake to try. At best, you will prevent a relatively small percentage of people with little understanding from being able to copy your content, and that is not the group people normally wish to impede.

Let's say you did create a new technology which actually prevented most forms of copying content. If a person sees your webpage they can take an image of the page at the push of a single button, then paste that image into photo shop. From there they can cut out your images and save them. They could also use a OCR to capture all the text. This can be done in 60 seconds.

There is a large interest in achieving the goal you seek and I am not aware of any organization that has come close on any level to achieving it. If somehow it was achieved, the page would not be readable by search engines. Search engines have to be able to read every character of text through their web crawlers. In effect, search engines scrape your content. If you find a technology to prevent copying text, it would prevent search engines from crawling as well.

The best your boss can do is copyright the website and/or images. It is highly likely your bosses fears will be realized at some point and his content or images will be stolen if it is of a high quality nature. A copyright will provide him with the maximum amount of legal protection. You can also employ the services of companies which will embed a tracking code of sorts into images. These companies then crawl the web each month looking for your protected content on other sites.