Honeypot Captcha - rated as "cloaked content"?
-
Hi guys,
in order to get rid of our very old-school captcha on our contact form at troteclaser.com, we would like to use a honeypot captcha.
The idea is to add a field that is hidden to human visitors but likely to be filled in by spam-bots. In this way we can sort our all those spam contact requests.
More details on "honeypot captchas":
http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/11/honeypot-captcha.aspxAny idea if this single cloaked field will have negative SEO-impacts? Or is there another alternative to keep out those spam-bots?
Greets from Austria,
Thomas -
Just in case anyone stumbles across this topic:
We started using honeypot captchas in 2011 and it really paid off. Not only because we got rid of the old captchas, but also because they are keeping out 99,99% of all bot inquiries or spam.
-
Hey Casey,
Thanks for the reply. Will have this tested soon. Really looking forward to getting rid of that captcha.
Regards,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas,
I've done some studies on this and you will be fine using this technique and Google won't give you any problems doing it. Check out my post on the Honeypot Technique, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/captchas-affect-on-conversion-rates. The technique works quite well blocking about 98% of SPAM.
Casey
-
Hi Keri,
Those are users without Java-Support.
Does that mean that Java Script is no issue then? -
Thomas, double-check if that stat is for users without Java, or users without javascript.
-
Good point, thanks.
As 15% of our visitors don't have Java, this won't work out
Actually we're trying to get rid of the captcha to increase our CR, that's why the "honeypot" version is very appealing.
-
You won't get any SEO impact, think about it for all the form with JS interaction on big sites
One easy solution is to use ajax post of the form only, very effective BUT you won't be able to get contact from visitors without javascript enabled. Maybe a good alternative.
Otherwise, you can use Recaptcha : http://www.google.com/recaptcha
This is free and easy to setup, works well with bots and access to everyone !
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?
Hi Everyone I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO. Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out. The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week. That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week. Does anyone have any experience of new channels coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it? thanks all!
Technical SEO | | NappyValleyNet1 -
Using "Div's" to place content at top of HTML
Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Cloaking?
We have on the home page of our charity site a section called "recent donations" which pulls the most recent donations from a database and displays them on the website via an asp write, (equivalent of php echo) . Google is crawling these and sometimes displays them in description tags -- which looks really messy. Is there a way to hide this content without it being considered cloaking?
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Duplicate Content Problem!
Hi folks, I have a quite awkward problem. Since a few weeks a get a huge amount of "duplicate content errors" in my MOZ crawl reports. After a while of looking for the error I thought of the domains I've bought additionally. So I went to Google and typed in site:myotherdomains.com The results was as I expected that my original website got indexed with my new domains aswell. That means: For example my original website was index with www.domain.com/aboutus - Then I bought some additional domains which are pointing on my / folder. What happened is that I also get listed with: www.mynewdomains.com/com How can I fix that? I tried a normal domain redirect but it seems as this doesn't help as when I am visiting www.mynewdomains.com the domain doesnt change in my browser to www.myoriginaldomain.com but stays with it ... I was busy the whole day to find a solution but I am kinda desperate now. If somebody could give me advice it would be much appreciated. Mike
Technical SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Similar Content vs Duplicate Content
We have articles written for how to setup pop3 and imap. The topics are technically different but the settings within those are very similar and thus the inital content was similar. SEOMoz reports these pages as duplicate content. It's not optimal for our users to have them merged into one page. What is the best way to handle similar content, while not getting tagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | Izoox0 -
Canonical pagination content
Hello We have a large ecommerce site, as you are aware that ecommerce sites has canonical issues, I have read various sources on how best to practice canonical on ecommerce site but I am not sure yet.. My concert is pagination where I am on category product listing page.. the pagination will have all different product not same however the meta data will be same so should I make let's say page 2 or 3 to main category page or keep them as is to index those pages? Another issue is using filters, where I am on any page and I filter by price or manufacturer basically the page will be same so here It seems issue of duplicate content, so should I canonical to category page only for those result types? So basically If I let google crawl my pagination content and I only canonical those coming with filter search result that would be best practice? and would google webmaster parameter handling case would be helpful in this scenario ? Please feel free to ask in case you have any queries regards
Technical SEO | | CNMOnline28
Carl0 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0
