Overview
Cloudflare Scrape Shield is a dedicated security suite designed to protect your website's content from unauthorised harvesting and theft. It implements specialised defensive measures—such as hiding sensitive information from bots while keeping it visible to human visitors—to reduce the risk of your data being misused by malicious actors.
This guide walks you through configuring the key features of Scrape Shield within the Libyan Spider Client Area, including Email Address Obfuscation, Server-Side Excludes, and Hotlink Protection.
Step-by-Step:
Enable Email Address Obfuscation
This feature prevents spambots and harvesters from discovering the email addresses listed on your site.
- Login to your Client Area account
- Navigate to Cloud Services > My Products & Services and select your Cloudflare service.
- On the left-hand sidebar, click the Scrape Shield tab.
- Locate the Email Address Obfuscation section.
- Toggle the switch to On.
- How it works: Cloudflare uses JavaScript to encrypt email addresses; they remain clickable and visible to humans but appear as gibberish to automated scrapers.
Configure Server-Side Excludes (SSE)
SSE allows you to hide sensitive parts of your web page from suspicious visitors without affecting your site's layout.
- Locate the Server-Side Excludes section.
- Toggle the switch to On.
- Implementation: Wrap the content you want to hide in SSE tags within your website's code: This text is hidden from suspicious visitors .
Enable Hotlink Protection
Hotlink Protection prevents other websites from embedding your images and assets directly into their pages, which saves your server's bandwidth.
- Locate the Hotlink Protection section.
- Toggle the switch to On.
- Exception Folder: You can allow specific images to be hotlinked by placing them in a directory named hotlink-ok on your server.
Note: This prevents your images from appearing on sites like Pinterest or Facebook, but legitimate visitors to your domain will see them normally.
Verification
After enabling Email Address Obfuscation, view your website's “Page Source” (Right-click > View Page Source). Your email addresses should no longer be visible in plain text.
