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The reverse of this is actually the interesting part. Give scrambled HTML to the browser, use a font to convert it to human readable text.

Obviously this wouldn't stop anyone willing to put a bit of effort into decoding it, but I bet lyric sites start using this soon.

Edit: Apparently I was confused like several others, but came to the right conclusion anyways.

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Why would a lyric site want to obfuscate lyrics in the source code? It seems like that'd be counterproductive since their traffic is largely driven by search engines.

Ideally you would store the original in an unciphered format and, say, GoogleBot hits your site you just serve it that unciphered one. If it is not a spider you can serve them the jumbled one.

As for lyric sites, they don't A) want people stealing content, B) have strict rules when publishing lyrics.

Eh, they could render it differently for Googlebot.

Then they would get hit with a cloaking penalty when the googlebot figures out its being cloaked.

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