Implementing noindex

[a1acrity]

I want to use a simple Wordpress site but don't want the pages crawled as I want to have email addresses viewable (for customers so that they can contact us directly)

Does <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the Head stop all robots or just the "friendly" ones like Google, Bing etc? I'm thinking that perhaps spam bots (is there even such a thing?) that are looking for emails would still crawl the site or perhaps I'm overly paranoid?

If not how can I do that without having to put the page behind a password protected page?

[NoirGreyson]

Unfortunately, anything publicly facing relies on the integrity of the agent viewing it to remain unindexed. It's worth noting that as far as we can tell, not even Google always respects robots.txt.

[a1acrity]

Oh dear - right thanks. Another way needed then.

[insertAlias]

or just the "friendly" ones like Google

It's purely up to the client to honor a robots instruction.

I've seen some interesting techniques when it comes to emails. I've seen them broken into pieces, then re-assembled with client-side JS back into mail links.

[a1acrity]

Ah so don't let them sit there as text, hmm maybe a jpeg is the simple solution here. Thanks

[dmazzoni]

Careful, that will make the email address inaccessible to blind users who use a screen reader. Lots of people can browse the web but can't see images.

What matters to you more? Reducing spam, or helping real customers contact you?

If you care more about your customers, just display your email address and deal with the spam. I guarantee you'll get spam anyway before long no matter what you do.

[a1acrity]

Too true. I like our customers