Hiding an email address from spambots and spiders
Monday, June 8th, 2009
There is an army of spiders out there. Some, like GoogleBot, you want scanning your site to be listed in their search engine. Many however have a devious purpose–to collect email addresses to add to spam email lists. If your email address is already out there, then there is no pulling it back in. The only way to eliminate spam is to create a different address and inform all your contacts that you have changed email addresses.
Ways to combat email spam:
- A non-linked image
- HTML entity encoding
- Client-side obfuscation/abstraction (via JavaScript)
- Server-side redirect
- Contact form (no email address listed)
If your email address, is spelled out with any client viewable code, it is possible to obtain. Now that search engines can read PDF documents, including your email within a PDF as text may be suspect. I have not gone into great depth on any of them below but have provided a short description of each method with advantages and disadvantages listed. (more…)