404 Errors on cdn-cgi/l/email-protection Links Across Website

General
1

What is the name of the domain?

wescalestartups.com

What is the issue you’re encountering

The issue is that 57 pages contain 59 broken links, primarily pointing to https://www.wescalestartups.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection, which returns a 404 error. These links are likely generated by Cloudflare’s Email Address Obfuscation feature, causing invalid URLs. Additionally, there are a few external links with 403 and 410 errors.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

Hi Cloudflare Community,
I’m encountering an issue with broken links on my website resulting in 404 errors. An Ahrefs Site Audit identified 57 pages with 59 broken links, most of which are these Cloudflare email obfuscation URLs.
Details:
The links appear to be generated by Cloudflare’s Email Address Obfuscation feature.

They’re present on key pages, including the homepage, contact page, and others.

My site uses Wordpress and is hosted with siteground.

I’ve confirmed Email Obfuscation is enabled in my Cloudflare dashboard under Scrape Shield, but the links are not resolving correctly.

What I’ve Tried:
Inspected the HTML source to locate the <a href="https://www.wescalestartups.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection"> tags.

Cleared Cloudflare’s cache and re-ran the site audit, but the issue persists.

Considered disabling Email Obfuscation but hesitated as I rely on it for spam protection.

Questions:
Is this a common issue with Email Obfuscation, and how can I fix these 404 errors without disabling the feature?

Could this be related to a misconfiguration in Cloudflare or a conflict with my CMS/plugins?

If I need to replace these links, what’s the best way to bulk-update them to proper mailto: links while maintaining spam protection?

Any tips for preventing this issue in the future?

Any guidance or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated! Happy to provide more details about my setup or Cloudflare settings if needed.

2

Yes, that’s true. And the whole idea is that bots (which often do not support JavaScript) cannot parse the URL to fetch the code to display the email address.

That would explain why your SEO tool is unable to parse the link (should be 403 though, not 404).

This is a case where you simply cannot have your cake and eat it too. You need to disable the Email Obfuscation feature completely if you want to get rid of this URL.

But a better plan (IMHO) is to Disallow the /cdn-cgi/ path (which serves URLs for other Cloudflare features, not just Email Obsfucation) in your robots.txt so search engines and bots will simply ignore these.

1 Like
3

Hi @GeorgeAppiah
Thanks for your response.

Yes, good point RE robots.txt, will implement.

Only reason I bring it up is that this is a new issue that didn’t previously exist?

Thanks!

4

i implemented ‘Disallow: /cdn-cgi/’ in th robots.txt but still seeing as broken link in Ahrefs. Any idea?

1 Like
5

Same for me here, this popped up in Ahrefs and all my cloudflare-deployed sites have dropped in Site Health by a lot. But this might be better pointed towards ahref support than towards cloudflare.

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