Katoomba Creative has been ensure that our clients are protected from spammers since 2003. We are stoked that it has never been easier to protect your emails, online forms, blog comments and reviews from spammers using a few simple tools.
This is your complete guide to stop spammers from harvesting your email address, completing your forms, and spamming your comments. So, grab your cuppa and let’s get started!
I have ranked these recommendations in order from the most generally applicable (for ALL websites) to more specific things to protect your website from spammers – that you need to do if you are running an active blog on your site or an eCommerce store.
1. Protect your email address from being harvested by spambots by using an email address obfuscator :
If you display your customer contact email address anywhere on your website (which is a pretty helpful thing to do for them) – Then you need to protect it from Spambots which are crawling through your website to find your email address.
These spambots have the sole mission to harvest your email address and add it to a nasty spammy mailing list or even more commonly – to sell it to as many spammers as possible – and you will soon have an ever increasing avalanche of spam!
You need to obfuscate your email address before you put it anywhere on your site to prevent this from happening. All you need to do is enter your email address into this awesome free email address obfuscator tool.
If you are reading this and you have already got snowed under with spam on a domain email address which everyone has already been using for years – there’s only one thing to do. Redirect the spam poisoned email address to a gmail address – and start using gmail to check your email for that address.
Why is this the best solution? Aren’t there 1000s of spam filter products and solutions out there to stop spammers?
The reason that I recommend the gmail forwarding solution for emails that have already been harvested by spammers is:
a. Gmail has the best, more sophisticated spam filter on the planet – bar none. You will minimise the number of emails that get accidentally put in the Junk Mail folder. You will get the best possible delivery of your real emails while minimising the spam in your Inbox.
b. Gmail is free (unless you need more than 15 Gigabytes of storage)
c. You will also get the smartest filtering and organisation of emails from all Social Media channels and all Marketing emails from businesses that you gave your email address to – or who passed it on to their “partners”.
2. Use ReCaptcha
reCaptcha is a free security service from Google to stop spammers You can choose from two different modes:
a. reCaptcha v2 – this requires input from your visitor. I’m 100% sure that you have already experienced this on any number of major website platforms. Tick the box to declare that you a human.
b. reCatcha v3 – requires no input from your visitor. It uses a score based on interactions with your website and enables you to choose what actions will be taken, based on that score.
3. Use Askimet to protect your Blog and Article Comments
Free for personal blog websites and $7.00AUD per month for business websites – Askimet is THE WordPress plugin to automatically stop spammers from leaving their spammy comments on your blog. Takes no effort than installing the plugin – and creating your Askimet account.
If you have a website which enables comments on your blog articles, then this is not an optional plugin – it is essential. Spam comments and links in your blog comments can destroy your ranking on Google – fast. For search engine optimisation it is absolutely essential to stop spammers from leaving comments on your blog.