Prevent Skype from Recognizing Phone Numbers in Your Website

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Skype Phone NumberSkype toolbar has a feature that recognizes phone numbers on a webpage and reformat it as a clickable button. If you have Skype installed on your computer, the image on the right might look familiar. Generally this is not a problem, but on many a sites this reformatting has been known to break website designs.

If you as a designer or website admin don’t want this behavior on your website, then you can easily prevent it by adding the below piece of code to your website header:

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

If you are running a WordPress blog, open your theme’s header.php file and add it anywhere before the closing </head> tag. As for all other websites and HTML documents, add the code between the <head>...</head> tags.

That’s all. Skype will no longer format numbers on your website no matter what browser it is being displayed on.

If you would like Skype to detect certain numbers, you can override the above code by wrapping the numbers within the following tags:

<!-- sphoneid telnr="+18004228888" fileas="John Smith" -->01 800 422 8888<!-- sphoneid -->