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A new HighRankings Forum thread asks if there is any downside in terms of SEO for using JavaScript that disables the ability to right-click on the page. The thread asks:
One of my company's sites has right-click functions disabled (yes, I realize this doesn't really stop people from stealing content - it wasn't my choice). I've noticed when I use a spider emulator (seo-browser.com) that our image alt tags appear to be invisible to the spiders. I can see the alt tags on the actual site, and I've verified that they are in the code, but they don't seem to show up for spiders. Could this be caused by our right-click disabling?
Most people in the thread say that it should have no impact on spiders crawling the site.
I then saw an older thread from Google Webmaster Help where Googler, JohnMu, said the same thing. He said and I bolded the key point:
Personally, I find the use of right-click-blocking JavaScript slightly annoying because there are many legitimate reasons why you might want to use the context menu (eg to bookmark the page) and it doesn't really stop people from viewing the source (Ctrl-U brings it up if you don't want to use the main menu). That said, this is not something that would bother Googlebot :-).
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum & Google Webmaster Help.
