I just did my sitemap and realized it detects my mailto for emails.
Should I disallow those in the robot.txt or not ?
I am wondering in term of link juice it it is an issue if I don't disallow those ?
deadsea
12:34 pm on Dec 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
1) Googlebot can't "crawl" mailto urls, so putting them in robots.txt has no effect.
2) A link to something that is in robots.txt drops Pagerank on the floor in the same way that using a nofollow on a link drops pagerank on the floor.
You should NOT put mailto into robots.txt. It does not make sense and does not conserve pagerank.
piatkow
4:33 pm on Dec 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
There are good reasons for not using a mailto before you even get to considerations as esoteric as this.
dstiles
10:14 pm on Dec 26, 2011 (gmt 0)
Also pays to encode the email address - and any "mailto" - if possible. Otherwise you WILL get spammers scraping the email address and sending you spam on the address. Guaranteed!
JS is no good for this! You must use some proper encoding that will allow punters to click on the address (or at least copy it) whilst not letting non-humans read it.
Apart from encoding the addresses I also check what kind of visitor it is (human-ish or non-human) and for the latter not put it on the site at all.
