Avoiding spam from your website
If you own a website one of the major issues that you face is the annoying amount of spam that you will received from spammers. Based on our many years on the web we have discovered several areas where the average website is targeted by spammers. Here is our list of the three most common spam sources and how to keep them spam free.
1) Your contact information
One of the favorite areas of spammer's collection activities targets the contact information found on your website. If you list your email for customers to contact you, you are also creating a door for spammers to spam you.
Solution:
Avoid placing your email on your website, instead of writing myname@mywebsite.com, write myname at mywebsite dot com. Or use an image to display your email so only your customers can see it. This works because most spammers use web robots to collect emails from websites. When you hide your email from these robots you will prevent them from collecting your email to spam you.
2) Form submission
Another source of irritating spam comes from what we called linkbots. These are web robots that visit web sites to place links in the web sites comments, blogs, or contact forms.
Solution:
Use anti-robot scripts to prevent robots from submitting your form. Anti-robot scripts are used by many major websites to prevent web bots from submitting forms by validating an image before submitting the form. Since, web bots are unable to read the image; they are unable to validate the form and therefore are unable to submit the form. Click here to see a form with an anti-robot script. By the way, our website designs use anti-robots scripts to keep your website spam proof.
3) WHOIS file
Another source of spam is your website WHOIS file. Here all your information is available for all to see.
Solution:
Use an email exclusively for your WHOIS data or use private registration. By following these simple tactics you can reduce or eliminate the amount of spam you will receive. Keep in mind that if you just started a website these tactics will tend to keep you spam free. However, if you already have a website, the use of these strategies may not stop spam completely, but will limit, prevent or decrease the amount of spam you will deal with in the future.
In today's internet, having a website designer that understands how to deal with spam is crucial. If your web designer does not take spam into account when creating your website, then you are not getting a professional website design.
