There are too many website owners displaying their email address in the “name [at] tld [dot] com” format, or something like that. Whatever happened to the good old mailto link with the email address being displayed how it’s supposed to? I’ll tell you what happened — spam happened.
Many site owners are afraid of displaying their email address, as it should be displayed, on their site. Since spammers can use scripts to scan websites, the same way google does, to look for email addresses. I’ve been seeing more and more contact forms and weirdly formatted addresses to combat the issue, but there’s a better way.
The robots.txt file in the root of your website is where you control what these bots can do and what they can’t. So if you’ve got your contact info on a certain page, then don’t allow bots to view that page. Bingo.
Now, the robots.txt file isn’t a standard and there’s nothing that guarantees that spam bots will follow the rules, but we can take this a step further.
