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How To Protect Your Product Download Page, Thank You Page And Private Page

What if your download page or thank you page is posted in a forum? Is your download page listed in Google? What about your eBook?

Your result of your hard work can be accessed by everyone because your page's URL is too simple to guess or your page is simply indexed by search engines such as Google. You invested your money, time and energy to create your best product but your product can be found by everyone easily without even paying you. You could loose thousands of dollars. You don't want this happen to you, do you?

Fortunately its remedy is simple. You just need to:

Create a random directory inside your domain to make it harder for people to guess the actual location of your precious page
And use robots.txt to prevent it from being indexed by search engines.
Or simply use Download Guardian for your ultimate protection.

Random directory

Creating random directory is simple. Simply use your FTP program to login into your server then create a new directory there. For your double protection, create another sub directory inside that new directory. Then put your product download page, thank you page or private page inside this directory.

For example: http://yourdomain.com/jw2r9/kam17/thanks.html where

yourdomain.com is your domain name.
jw2r9 is your random directory.
kam17 is your random sub directory inside jw2r9 directory.
thanks.html is your product download page, thank you page or private page.

Now, if you have a product to be downloaded, you do the same things for its location.

For example: http://yourdomain.com/z3mo8/9jk4f/product.pdf where

yourdomain.com is your domain name.
z3mo8 is your random directory.
9jk4f is your random sub directory inside z3mo8 directory.
product.pdf is your product to be downloaded.

This trick makes it harder for people to guess where your precious page is but it still doesn't prevent search engines to index your page. In addition, once someone purchases your product, he can save it to his Favorite or Bookmarks with the possibility to share it with others. So it's wise to move around your precious pages regularly.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a simple text file that tells the search engine robots not to crawl certain directories and pages of your site.

When a robot crawls your site it looks for the robots.txt file. If it doesn't find one it assumes automatically that it may crawl and index the entire site. Not having a robots.txt file can also create unnecessary 404 errors (page not found error) in your server logs, making it more difficult to track the real 404 errors.

Creating robots.txt file is easy.

Open your notepad or other text editor (not HTML editor)
Type this following to prevent all robots to crawl or index your certain directory:

User-agent:*
Disallow:/directory/

where directory is the directory that you don't want to be crawled or indexed by search engine robots.

If we use the first example in the random directory, type this following:

User-agent:*
Disallow:/jw2r9/

Save the file as robots.txt
Upload it to your domain root directory so that it looks like this: http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt
Confirm if everything is correct using robots.txt validator

For more information on robots.txt, you can visit www.robotstxt.org.

Are these two tricks enough to protect your product download page, thank you page and private page? Perhaps, because nothing is perfect in this world.

So I'll give you another trick to triple protect your precious page :)

Meta tags

Another trick, which may be more convenient for page usage, adds a META tag to an HTML page to tell search engine robots not to index the page.

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place this following META tag into the HEAD section of your page:

That should helps protect your precious pages.

One more trick, exclusive to blog only!

Disallow Pings

All of those tricks above are useless if you still allow pings for your blog page or blog post.

Disallow pings for your precious page.

If you use Wordpress:

Expand your discussion tab
Uncheck "Allow Pings"

These tricks should help you protect your product download page, thank you page and private page. However, these tricks don't protect your precious page if your buyer adds it to his Internet Explorer's Favorite, Firefox's Bookmarks or social bookmarks and share the link with his friends.

For your ultimate protection, you need Download Guardian!

Download Guardian

Download Guardian

Stops download link sharing, thank you page and download page sharing with expiring download links.
Allows you to set a time limit for the amount of time a link is valid.
Limit the number of times someone can use that link.
Offers flexible security for your product, helping to fight against piracy.
And many more.

By: Aldian Prakoso

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Aldian Prakoso shares the latest practical tips and tricks in Internet marketing and affiliate blogging in his blog at www.aldianprakoso.com
Visit www.aldianprakoso.com/protect to learn how to ultimately protect your product and download page, and how to get Download Guardian.

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