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Are You Mad About Spam?
Are you receiving tons of spam emails every day?
You know, those "get rich quick" nonsense, MLM schemes,
pills, millions of email addresses offers...
They drove me mad when I put up my first web site.
You will encounter the same problem when your online business
grows. This is an annoying bi-product of successful web sites.
How did the spammers get your email address?
You see, all web site operators want search engine spiders to
visit their web site. After all, search engines are the best source of free
targeted traffic. In the event that you don't want them to
visit, they are easily kept at bay with a properly formatted
"robots.txt" file.
Unfortunately, there's another group of spiders out there
crawling the web with an entirely different purpose. These are
the spiders that visit site after site, collecting email
addresses. They are known as spam bots, or email harvesters.
When it comes to controlling these spam bots, robots.txt
simply won't get the job done. In fact, most spam robots will
ignore robots.txt. In addition to harvesting your email address
and sending you spams, they also waste your treasured bandwidth.
There's not much you can do to stop them visiting
your web site. But at least you can hide your email address from
spam bots to keep spams you receive to minimum. Here's the trick.
One of the weaknesses of spiders of all kinds is an
inability to process scripts. Adding a small snippet of Javascript
in place of an email address effectively renders the address
invisible to spiders, while leaving it accessible to your visitors
with all but the most primitive browsers.
In the examples below, simply substitute your
email username and your domain
name. To use the
scripts, just insert them into your pages wherever you need
them to be displayed.
Spam-Proof Mailto Link
This snippet of code creates a clickable link that launches the
visitor's email application, just like any normal email link does. You can replace the link
text with your own message, but see example 2 if you want to
display your email address as the link text.
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "username";
var hostname = "yourdomain.com";
var linktext = "Send Me Email";
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:"
+ username +
"@" + hostname + ">" + linktext +
"</a>")
//-->
</script>
Spam-Proof Mailto Link With Your
Email Address Showing
Some visitors won't be able to use a mailto link, and will instead
need to read the email address. You can use the script
below instead.
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "username";
var hostname = "yourdomain.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:"
+ username +
"@" + hostname + ">" + linktext +
"</a>")
//-->
</script>
Display Your Email Address Without A
Mailto Link
Sometimes, you just want to give your email address without making
it a clickable link. Here's how to do that.
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "username";
var hostname = "yourdomain.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write(username + "@" + hostname)
//-->
</script>
Another simple solution is to use a contact
form. Your email address is invisible to both spiders and visitors
while you can still communicate with visitors effectively. There
are plenty of free CGI scripts
out there you can use.
Feel free to use this article in your
publication or web site.
It's pre-licensed to you.
The only requirement is to include this resource box:
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Article by Zac Hewlett at
1stSingaporeWebHosting
Visit http://www.1stSingaporeWebHosting.com
for more
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marketing tips and techniques.
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