How Your Website Is Inviting Spam (And How to Stop It)
Hey there everybody, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude.
I want to give you an update this month on email and website security, kind of a combination there.
One of the things that we’ve noticed over the years is whenever you put an actual email address listed on a website, it usually just gets scraped by spam bots and AI now. And then that email gets used to send you spam. A lot of it can be fairly innocent, but in some cases, you can get a situation like this.
Clients started to send me this email that they were getting, and it comes from [email protected] First sign, it’s probably not from us. We send from our dmdude.com email. But they start talking about support and due to one of the vendors that we use for some of our services, which our clients, you know, they don’t know that. So it’s kind of like, what is that?
We always do a full SEO setup from the very beginning for all our clients as well, so it’s already been done. There’s nothing else to do anyway. Where they got this email and this information was basically just from the website itself.
So we really highly recommend that folks use a form on the website versus just having your email address just sitting on the website, because it can get scraped and used for purposes like that.
So we recommend, you know, have a contact form. Contact forms can get spam as well. And so we use, you know, Google’s got a tool for CAPTCHA to help limit the spam that can come in using CAPTCHA.
So I’ve got a calendar there to book with, but I also have this basic contact form. It uses the CAPTCHA from Google to help prevent spam from coming in. It still does happen. It doesn’t prevent all of it, but it prevents the majority of it.
But if you go through my website, you’re not going to see anywhere where it lists an email address, “Contact us at this email address.” So we recommend just using a form.
For our clients, we’re just going to start changing that out and making those changes over time.
And then the other thing where we get a lot of spam from as business owners, if you have a business email account, there’s this platform called Apollo that allows marketers to buy access to email lists.
So what we recommend, and I’ll put this link in the blog post, is that you go to this link here where it says “Don’t sell my info,” and you can opt out your email address from being in their database. And that will help cut down on the number of spam emails that you might get from that.
So to recap, this video is about your email address being actually on your website where it’s visible, or even if it’s a link there that says “click here to email” and then it opens up the email. We don’t recommend that either.
We recommend that you use just a form on your website and not have your email address just listed on the website, because AI bots and other tools can scrape that off your website. You wind up in a database like this, and you wind up getting a lot more spam.
And it can actually lead to things like this where you’re actually getting fraudulent emails, people trying to actually scam you out of money.
So if you have questions about this, just put it in the comments where you see this, and I’m happy to take a look at your own website and make sure that you’ve got the right things in place for email security.
Here is the link to Opt Out of Apollo Email Database -
Click Here to Opt Out
AI Summary
This post explains why business owners should never display their email address directly on their website. Public email addresses are easily scraped by bots, AI tools, and spam databases, which leads to increased spam, phishing attempts, and even fraudulent emails that appear to come from trusted companies or vendors.
Instead of listing an email address or using “click to email” links, the post recommends using secure contact forms with CAPTCHA protection to reduce automated spam submissions. While no system is perfect, CAPTCHA blocks the majority of unwanted traffic and significantly improves email security.
The post also highlights how business emails end up in marketing databases, such as Apollo, where marketers can purchase access to email lists. It explains how to opt out of these databases using “Do Not Sell My Info” links to reduce future spam.
Key takeaways:
- Never list your email address publicly on your website
- Avoid “click to email” links that expose your address
- Use contact forms with CAPTCHA instead
- Understand how email scraping works
- Opt out of email list databases that sell contact information
- Reducing spam also reduces the risk of scams and fraud
Overall, the post focuses on protecting business email security, reducing spam, and preventing phishing and financial scams by making simple but critical changes to how contact information is collected on a website.
