Email Addresses in Google SERPs - even when obscured with javascript

[vordmeister]

I've always obscured my email addresses with JavaScript. People with JavaScript get a mailto: link, and people without get text with the @ replaced with (at).

I've just searched for my email address on Google, and they return results from pages where it is obscured with javascript. Also they print it in text in their results for people to scrape away at.

I have cache turned off so can't look much further.

Can we offer email addresses in any form these days or is a contact form denied with robots.txt the only answer? What's the form these days for hiding your email address from Google now they've got annoying.

[g1smd]

I use an external JS file to build the link, the JS building the link from fragments of code.

I've never seen those email addresses in SERPs nor are they receiving spam.

[Robert Charlton]

My experience is essentially the same as g1smd's. Here's a discussion from several years back that examines the merits of various approaches. Note that some of the very simple approaches can probably be decoded by the more sophisticated harvest bots.

Protecting Email Addresses From Harvesters
[webmasterworld.com...]

You can find other threads via site search... try terms like these in various combinations:

email javascript encoders js mailto spam.

[Robert Charlton]

PS to the above....

People with JavaScript get a mailto: link, and people without get text with the @ replaced with (at).

Conceivably, Google has taken to interpreting results, and your <noscript> text (which is the default that Google would see) might be getting "translated" by Google. I tend to doubt it, but you never know.

I would consider your particular noscript approach one of the more easily crackable formats... and I blush as I re-read the thread referenced above that I considered it as alt text for an image meant to hide the true address, without seeing the obvious vulnerability.

[vordmeister]

Thanks - external Javascript would be an quick improvement. I'll scan around for other solutions. I know my approach is crackable, but I like to make it easy for humans to crack. I was just a bit disappointed that Google had cracked it to save everyone else the trouble.

I suppose it does make sense, as people sometimes construct javascript navigation in a similar manner, and that doesn't mean their site is entirely bad. Just that javascript by itself isn't a way of hiding things from Google anymore.

[dstiles]

Many people are turning off javascript now. I visited a site today and could not navigate without it, so I left. The same applies to email addresses.

I've been using a method for several years now that does not seem to have been cracked, although it's easy to do so: I assume bots are lazy. (I'm basing the above on the fact that we've had very little spam to those addresses and what we have could easily have been scraped from customers' trojanned desktop computers.)

In more recent years I check to see if the visitor is a browser or a bot. If the latter the address is omitted from the page altogether. If I don't detect the bot as such it gets the obscured version of the email. On some sites it's linked but I advise against it since mailto is relatively easily detected whether it's obscured or not. On some sites the @ is obfuscated in some way that's obvious to a human.