How to reduce your website spam with a Contact Form vs Posted Email Address

Spiders are not just the lovable daddy long legs like on “Honey I shrunk the Kids”, or the creepy crawlers that give you the puffed up eye lid morning present.  On the internet, they are used to “scrape” emails off of websites.  So if you post your email addresses on your website you are prone to being scraped by one of these virtual creepy crawlers and getting on an unwanted mass emailing list.  Even if you post your email addresses with spaces, or spell out the @ as [at], or use other similar syntax, if the program used to search for email addresses accounts for these common email address displays used to avoid spammers, you’re in the web.

So, what’s the alternative?  Anyways if you do some special display thing to your posted email address on your website, it is certainly not convenient to your website visitors – they will have to copy/paste the email address, or even if it is clickable, make sure to edit it properly to make it your true email address, per your instructions – like take out the spaces, or replacing the [at] with @.   But what is convenient is having a contact form on your website – this way you avoid the email scraping spiders and you have provided an easy way for your website visitors and potential customers to contact you directly from your website.  Plus you can add useful custom fields to your contact form and choose which are required and which are optional.  Just make sure that your contact form is coded properly – i.e. your email address is not in the page view source code!  If you’re using the UltimateWB contact form app or the built-in forms builder, no worries on that!