: Do search engines index mailto and tel links? I have a website that allows users to display their email address and contact number on their public profile page. These would be in link format,

@Cody1181609

You can tell Google in your HTML markup to ignore a section of HTML.

<!-- googleoff: all-->
<a href="mailto:user%40email.com" title="email user">user@email.com</a>
<a href="tel:+123456789" title="call user">+123456789</a>
<!-- googleon: all-->


That will prevent that piece of HTML from appearing in the cache or being indexed. It offers no security and is only supported by Google.

You can perform Javascript based obfuscation of the email. Here is a jQuery plugin that does that.
github.com/mikebranski/jquery-nospam
Alternately, you can do the opposite and share contact information in a way they can index more effectively. Using the hCard microdata format.
microformats.org/wiki/hCard
The only way to prevent webcrawlers from accessing this information is to only show it to authorized user sessions that have been verified as humam. Even that is a challenge.

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@Holmes151

Now search engine are able to index mostly everything, even some JavaScript code, except if encrypted. If you don't want to disturb your clients and lose your PageRank you can read these excellent answers: stackoverflow.com/a/12566551/2491683 - or search in Google for the query: encrypt a link.

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@Speyer207

Most commonly mistaken thing about the 'nofollow' tag is that has nothing to do with not indexing content. I recommend you read the true meaning of nofollow.

Also technically email addresses and tel links are internal links so there should be no reason to use a nofollow tag on it. Furthermore, mailto and tel are not pages or links to content in any way.

If you don't want email addresses being indexed then you should add that content dynamic and after the page has loaded, or alternatively use some form of JavaScript that Google and other search engines don't understand.

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