Why Encrypt?
Question: Since your encrypted Web Page Protection page shows how easy it is to obtain the decrypted source of any web page, why would I want to bother with encryption at all and why have you provided an HTML Source Encryptor form?
anonymous
Answer: Encrypting your page content is useless for stopping people from manually performing the steps to decrypt your page and steal your page source (assuming that anyone wants to steal your source in the first place). Where encryption is effective is in blocking automated processes.
There are a number of automated processes that you almost certainly want to block. These include:
- Email Spiders scan web sites looking for email addresses coded into your page. By obscuring or encrypting the email addresses in your page you can reduce the chances that these spiders will recognise and harvest these email addresses and therefore reduce the amount of spam that these addresses will receive.
- Site Rippers are used to download entire web sites in one go. This uses a large chunk of your available bandwidth and the pages may not even be viewed. By encrypting or obscuring the links on your page you will restrict site rippers to downloading a single page. This would also impact on search engine spiders being able to follow the links to find the pages on your site so you would need to submit each page separately to the search engines if you do this.
There are all sorts of other automated web processes where encrypting part or all of your page content would interfere or even totally block the automated process. You need to consider whether blocking these processes is an appropriate action as only some of these processes are harmful while others provide useful or even essential functions.
The other area where encryption can be useful is in allowing you to effectively password protect a page where you don't have access to the server to set up password protected directories. By having the page ask for a valid password before displaying the page and having the password encrypted your page is as secure from people who don't know the password as you can get without using password protected directories. Someone without the password would have to find a way of decrypting your page without displaying it first in order to obtain access.
