Updated On: 2021-11-21
Referred to as: Captcha, are you a robot?
Category: General
Correct Use: Refer to the documentation of the captcha system you are using.
Description:
A captcha is a technique used to determine if a user agent or site visitor is a genuine person or an automated program such as a bot or robot.
The captcha usually has a question or non-guessable information that requires human analysis to correctly and appropriately answer.
This is the traditional “are you a robot” challenge.
Our take: Captchas are a necessary part of taking user entry and preventing spam form entries and inquiries.
Do: Use a common capture such as Google’s captcha to protect against spam entries.
Don’t: Don’t make it so complex and difficult that it requires a PhD to solve.
Tip: Make sure your captcha works on all screen sizes. Test it out, some captchas don’t render well or work well on all devices and can be a roadblock for your site visitors.
Be aware that any content and links that you have that are behind a captcha will stay there and a search engine won’t be able to find, crawl and index them so they won’t end up in a SERP.
Introduced:
Commonly considered to have been introduced in 2003 but the principle was actually invented in 1997. Read more on Captcha here.