A client has advised me that she gets a lot of span from the e-mail links on her website. The e-mail address was showing on every page, and embedded in the contact us page too.

 

I have removed the e-mail address from all pages and excluded robots with <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">

 

Does anyone know of a more effective way around this problem?

 

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Use a contact form instead.

 

You don't want to exclude robots, because only well-behaved robots (like search engine spiders) will pay the slightest bit of attention to that tag. The sort of bots written to harvest email addresses for spam will ignore it completely.

Well first off .. SpaM. I know, petty, but it was annoying me.

 

Secondly, as RD said, use a contact form. There are many tricks you can use to catch bots out with forms. How clever you want to get depends on how far down the user experience rabbit hole you want to go.

 

There is the traditional CAPTCHA. - Fairly annoying to real people, but normal.

There is the 'answer this question correctly' - Slightly annoying to real people, really annoying to stupid people.

The hidden check box - Effective and invisible to real people. Bots are getting cleverer though.

Email Verification - Very annoying to real people but also very effective against bots.

 

Essentially it boils down to a simple sliding scale. The less spam you want, the more you have to p*** off your users. Where is your balance? Personally I go with least annoyance, absolutely none if possible. I'll deal with 500 spam/day and a little message that tells people I might miss their mail because of that, try again if it means absolutely everyone tries at least once to get in touch and doesn't just give up at the form.

Thank you to Glowbridge and Renaissance Design for this helpful advice re span

 

Kath