More often than not I see sites that have a mailto link with an exposed email. This is setting yourself up to have your email harvested.

A quick and easy trick that you can use to hide emails from spiders is to replace the letters with html characters.

Here is some simple Ruby code to do this for you:

"mailto:me@myself.com".each_byte { | byte | print "&#%s;" % byte }

Now a spider will have a hard time detecting emails in your source, as most of them scan for mailto: or the something@example.xxx pattern.

You can also use this method to hide any data on a site that you think would or could be useful to a spider.

Happy prevention!