Protect Your Income By Protecting Your Digital Downloads

If you make your living selling digital downloads then listen very carefully because you could be losing money if you haven't adequately protected those digital downloads.

There are a number of ways to provide access to your digital downloads to your customers and protect those downloads from everyone else. This articles covers one way which is -

Provide a download link to your customer either through an email or a download page

This is usually the more common method used when you first start out. Here is an example from my web site of those two methods -

First off is the download page here - www.easywebresources.com/MZ45wh/6figures_download.php

If you click on the above link, you will find yourself at the download page for a report. This download page contains a nice 'Thank You' message and instructions for downloading and opening the file. Go ahead and click the link (and feel free to download the report as well).

Next is the download link that would be included in a 'Thank You' email. The email would contain the same instructions as the download page.

This is exactly the same as the download link that would be found in the download page. www.easywebresources.com/MZ45wh/make_six_figures.zip

Now while there is nothing wrong with this method of access for your customers there are three shortcomings but there are ways of overcoming them as well.

Shortcoming 1

The download link or the download page can be accessed by anyone so if one of your customers chooses to, they can tell all their friends/family/work colleagues, in fact, they can tell the entire world. I have used a random folder name i.e. MZ45wh to make it harder for someone to guess the location of my download folder but it won't stop one of customers after they have been given the download folder in a download link.

To overcome this would you would need to change the download link and download page on a regular basis of say once or twice a week.

Shortcoming 2

Someone may 'find' their way to your download folder. If this happened then that person would have access to ALL the files in that folder. To overcome this you should have an index.html file in ALL of your folders. For folders that are download folders or where you want to keep people out, you could create an index.html file that redirects those people to your home page.

If you click on my folder link here - www.easywebresources.com/MZ45wh/

.... you will notice that you are re-directed to my home page.

Here is a sample file with the appropriate code in it.Just 'right click' on the link and select 'save as' from the menu. Instructions for its use are in the file itself.

www.easywebresources.com/MZ45wh/redirect.txt

Just a note - a lot of the better web hosts will have your web hosting setup, or allow you the option if you ask them, to stop viewing of folders that don't have an index page. Instead the visitor will see an error page that says 'You don't have permission ....' BUT every Internet marketer knows it is better to get a visitor to your home page than to just get an error message so I would still strongly suggest the redirect page.

Shortcoming 3

Portable Document File (PDF) is the most popular file format in use today because the file format is cross platform meaning you can read the same PDF file on any computer platform e.g. MAC, PC, Linux etc.

However many of the search engines, if they can see your PDF, will LIST that PDF file in their search listings which means that if you searched for 'make six figures' and Google has found my folder, then it may be listed and people will be able to download YOUR file for nothing, zilch, nada.

There are two things you could do to prevent this from happening

A. You could compress (or zip) your files

This has two benefits - it stops the search engines from 'seeing' your PDF file as search engines won't list zip files. It also has the added benefit that it reduces the file size so that the download doesn't take as long. This is a particular benefit to dial up users.

B. You can give the search engine 'spiders' instructions on what they shouldn't list.

This is done by creating a robot.txt file, if you don't already have one, to tell the search engines what they SHOULDN'T list or by adding instructions to the index file of a folder to stop the robots from 'spidering' that specific folder.

My robot.txt file would require the following lines to stop any search engine spiders from searching my download folder -

# This disallows all search engine bots from my download directory and files:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /MZ45wh/

The disadvantage of this method is that, unfortunately, there are disreputable people who create spiders to specifically search for downloadable files and folders. This entry in the robot.txt file may tell one of these disreputable spiders exactly where to go looking. In other words, if you say don't go to /MZ45wh that is exactly where they might go just to see what you are hiding.

Instead of using the robot.txt file you could modify the index file of your download folder with the following meta tag in between the [head] tags -

[meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"]

This tells the spiders that they should index this page or follow any of the links from this page.


There are, of course, more sophisticated ways of providing protection for your digital downloads through scripts. These will be the subject of another article in the future. Stay tuned ...