Tips for Combating Spam Bots At Your Site

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Internet marketers often hear of the word “bots” in a good light. After all, every website owner wants Google’s bots to crawl their site all throughout. But plenty of webmasters are not aware that not all bots are good, just ask John Connor. But I digress.

Essentially bots can do either good or bad things depending on the person that created it. So while Google or Yahoo! bots are very much welcome in our site, there are also other bots that we need to be wary of. Case in point is the presence of bots created to harvest important information from different sites through the World Wide Web.

These little virtual critters are programmed to go through all web pages available to them and grab whatever information they are ordered to gather like email addresses. These are usually used by shady internet marketers who are in the business of gathering email address and selling them to other business which in turn send marketing pitches and promises of wealth from Nigerian princes.

Sure, you can easily mark messages as spam but what if you have a website wherein people can create profile and leave their email addresses so that other members of the site can contact them? You are responsible for the safekeeping of said information. Do you want your site to be labeled as an email grabbing web space even if you have nothing to do with the people sending all those spam messages? I hope not.

Like King Leonidas you might ask “what can you do?” Fortunately, we have some answers for you.

The first web design trick I can share with you is not using the “@” symbol. Spam bots or harvester bots know what info to take back to their masters because they know how the data is formatted. Thus, they will be looking for the aforementioned symbol. What you can do to keep the email addresses safe from these World Wide Web wanderers is to replace the “@” symbol with its ASCII counterpart in your source code. So instead of yourname@domain.com, the bots would read yourname@domain.com.

Of course, the people making a living off gathering email addresses would not rest on their laurels and they also know this can thwart their plans. So, they might instruct their bots to look for that ASCII code. That means we have to think of another way to thwart this threat from spam bots. So behind door number 2 is Javascript.

Basically, you create a script where you would define different variables like the username, the domain, and the extension. Then, you order the script to concatenate these three variables with the addition of the “@” symbol in the right order. Underneath your site where the code lies, these spam bots would not be able to find the ASCII code for the “@” symbol. Instead, they will see the symbol itself but not in the format [email protected] so they would skip right over that bit.

There is a drawback too. If someone dropped by your site and he or she is using a browser with Javascript disabled (to stop pop-ups and make Javascript-laden sites with flashy graphic design load faster), the email address would not be displayed.

We’re screwed then? Not really thanks to the miracle of server-side scripting. Unlike Javascript which is client-side, server-side scripting allows you to have a simple email form which your website users can use without having the need to place the recipient email address anywhere on your site. Depending on what you are familiar with, you can use Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, or ASP.

Unfortunately, there is somewhat of a problem here as some webhosts does not support server-side programming. If your site is hosted in such a place, you can turn to our first two tricks or you can just pack your bags and move your site because hosting flexibility is very important for any serious internet marketer.