Yesterday's blog talked about the steps that you can take to minimise the risk of your personal email address falling into the hands of the spammers. However, if your small business has a web site then there are further considerations. Email spammers employ the same spidering techniques as used by the search engines in order to trawl the web for email addresses. So any email address that appears in plain text on a web page is liable to get picked up.
One option is not to display an email address at all. Instead put a simple form on your contact page. However if you do want to display your email address then your should use one of the following techniques to make it less "spiderable"
1. Encode your email address in the HTML. There are lots of free encoders available. Here is the one that we use http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html. In theory it would be a simple job for the spiders to decode these, but maybe it's not worth their while.
2. Use Javascript to hide the email address. That's then pretty much safe from the spiders, but you do have to cater for the small number of visitors who run with scripting turned off in their browsers. If you look at the source code for our Contacts page you will see an example of how to do this.
Finally, armed with just your domain name the spammers will still hit you by guessing at commonly used addresses such as contact@, sales@, info@. So, just don't use these and redirect them to the black hole if they start receiving spam.
The information is provided 'as is'. It has worked for us,
but it may not work for you, so you use it at your own risk. We can't
enter into any correspondance about anything recorded here but please feel free to leave a comment.
Geographical coverage: AlphaOne Computing Services
provides a range of small business computer support and I.T. services throughout Sussex, including
Brighton, Hove, Shoreham, Worthing, Steyning, Burgess Hill,
Haywards Heath, Crawley, Lewes, Newhaven, Seaford, Uckfield and Eastbourne.
