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
-
Old Content Pages
Hello we run a large sports website. Since 2009 we have been doing game previews for most games every day for all the major sports..IE NFL, CFB, NBA, MLB etc.. Most of these previews generate traffic for 1-2 days leading up to or day of the event. After that there is minimal if any traffic and over the years almost nothing to the old previews. If you do a search for any of these each time the same matchup happens Google will update its rankings and filter out any old matchups/previews with new ones. So our question is what would you do with all this old content? Is it worth just keeping? Google Indexes a majority of it? Should we prune some of the old articles? The other option we thought of and its not really practical is to create event pages where we reuse a post each time the teams meet but if there was some sort of benefit we could do it.
Technical SEO | | dueces0 -
How can I Style Long "List Posts" in Wordpress?
Hi All, I have been working on a list-post which spans over 100 items. Each item on the list has a quick blurb to explain it, an image and a few resource links. I am trying to find an attractive way to present this long list post in Wordpress. I have seen several sites with long list posts however; they place their items one on top of the other which yields a VERY long page and the end user has to do a lot of scrolling. Others turn their lists into slideshows, but I have no data on how slides perform against 10-mile-long-lists which load in 1 page. I would like to do something similar to what List25.com does as they present about 5-10 items per page and they seem to have pagination. The pagination part I understand however; is there a shortcode plugin to format lists in an attractive way just like list25?
Technical SEO | | IvanC0 -
Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
"Products 1-20" text in the Serp Results
We have e-commence site (zen-cart) and we use our category pages (which has the list of the products) as landing pages. In the Serp results our link is showing up like this Our Page Title www.link.com Rich snip stuff Products 1 - 40 of 93 - Meta Description text I just wanted to know where its getting the "Products 1 - 40 of 93" from, and can it be removed (if we wanted to)? On the landing page say "Displaying 1 to 40 (of 93 products)", But i looked in to the source and it does not say "Products 1 - 40 of 93" anywhere, so google must be coming up with that text. I have noticed other zen-cart sites have the same text, and other e-commence sites have something similar like " 20+ Products"
Technical SEO | | eunaneunan0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/ MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat0 -
Different version of site for "users" who don't accept cookies considered cloaking?
Hi I've got a client with lots of content that is hidden behind a registration form - if you don't fill it out you can not proceed to the content. As a result it is not being indexed. No surprises there. They are only doing this because they feel it is the best way of capturing email addresses, rather than the fact that they need to "protect" the content. Currently users arriving on the site will be redirected to the form if they have not had a "this user is registered" cookie set previously. If the cookie is set then they aren't redirected and get to see the content. I am considering changing this logic to only redirecting users to the form if they accept cookies but haven't got the "this user is registered cookie". The idea being that search engines would then not be redirected and would index the full site, not the dead end form. From the clients perspective this would mean only very free non-registered visitors would "avoid" the form, yet search engines are arguably not being treated as a special case. So my question is: would this be considered cloaking/put the site at risk in any way? (They would prefer to not go down the First Click Free route as this will lower their email sign-ups.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TimBarlow0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0 -
"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue
I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page. The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/ Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?
Technical SEO | | BethelMedia0