There are a variety of ways to protect and hide emails and other information from email harvesters or just to protect your privacy through obfuscation, a technique on the web that allows displaying of email and content within web browsers so browsers can understand them, but masks them from web crawlers and bots.
A typical email link would be:
<a href="mailto:fredsmith@gmail.com" title="Email Fred">email</a>
An obfuscated email address link would look like this:
<a href="mailto:&#102;&#114;&#101;&#100;&#115;&#109;&#105;&#116;&#104;&#064;&#103;&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;" title="Email Fred">email</a>
Free Online Tools to Obfuscate Email Addresses
Instead of doing this manually using HTML Character Entities, there are a variety of free online tools to obfuscate email addresses. The output can be set to be in HTML characters or use JavaScript or other code methods. NOTE: WordPress.com blogs are restricted to only HTML Character Entities.
- Online Email Obfuscator
- Email Harvester Robots, Spam and Email Obfuscation
- Obfuscate email tool – Online tool
There are a variety of WordPress Plugins that will handle the job for you automatically, too. Check the WordPress Plugin Directory for the latest versions and options.
For more information on obfuscation, see:
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