How to Stop Search Engines helping Ebook Thieves

^{How to Stop Search Engines helping Ebook Thieves!}

^{You will be surprised to see how search engines help hackers

to steal your Ebooks. With certain search techniques, the

download link of your Ebook can be found in many search

engines. This helps Thieves to download Digital products

like Ebooks, Reports, Software etc. without making the

payments. So, make sure that your download page is not listed

in Google (R)!

Let us see how hackers get the URL of your download page from

search engine listings.

If you search the following key words in Google, you will get

clearly what I am talking about.

"Thank you for your order" + ClickBank

"Thanks for your order" + ClickBank

Thank you+download+Clickbank

You can see that Google has listed many download Pages!

Here is another example; A Thief can search for a page that

is named thankyou.htm as follows:

inurl:thankyou.htm

When he/she type the above words in Google, a list of pages

named 'thankyou.htm' will be displayed.

Very easy! Isn't it?

Readers may kindly note that I have given the above keywords

just for your information and I have no intention to

encourage my readers to go and download somebody's products

without paying them. You can imagine what if the surfers pass

those links to their friends and spread them all over the Web!

If you don't consider security issues at this point, anybody

can steal your info-products very easily and your eBusiness

will be in trouble.

Now we are going to stop this for ever with simple techniques.

We know that nobody will submit download page URLs to Search

Engines. Then how do they get listed in Search Engines. Human

controlled Search Directories do not index these pages unless

they are submitted intentionally. (Example:- Dmoz.com) But

Robot (Spider) controlled Engines like Google may index such

pages. The following techniques can be used to prevent

indexing your download page URLs and listed in search engines.

1) Do not make a link to your Download page from another part

of your site. Usually nobody does it but make sure it doesn't

happen. When the Search Engine's Robot visit your site for

indexing, it will automatically visit all connected links

and add them into their list.

2) Ensure that you do not 'link back' the download page to

any other page of your site. For example, your download page

may have a link back to your 'support page' or 'contact page'.

It is necessary to provide your contact details and customer

support information on download page. But no link shall be

provided from the download page to any other page. If you

provide such a link, it is likely that the search engine will

index and give more popularity to the download page than a

standalone page.

3) Don't add Meta Tags and Keywords in your Download Page.

Again, I think nobody does it intentionally. Suppose, if

you want to give the same color and look to the 'ThankYou page'

as other pages of your site, you might copy another page and

modify it to create one easily. But if the Meta and Keywords

of the original page might not be removed.

4) Add the following Tags to all of your download pages.

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

All you have to do is to include this tag in the HEAD part

of the page. The 'noindex' Tag will prevent the Robot from

indexing anything on your page and the 'nofollow' Tag will

prevent from following any of the links on that page.

5) When you name your download directory, don't give a

simple and generally used name like /download/,

/ebookdownload/, /thankyou/ etc. or similar. Hackers may try

different words like these to see what comes up in their

attempt to steal your products.

6) Don't name the download page thankyou.htm, download.html

or anything similar - use something like X9cd4H0p.htm

7) Don't keep free Ebooks and Ebooks for sale at the same

directory. The reason is that a hackers may try different

file names similar to those of your products to download

them from a directory, the existence of which is already

known to him.

8) Here is a simple trick to stop people from finding out

the contents of a Download Directory on the server. Just

make an 'index.htm' or 'index.html file and copy it to

that directory. When somebody types;

'www.YourSite.com/DownloadDirectory/'

only the index.htm file will be displayed and not the

contents of that directory.

9) Change Download directory name regularly; once every week

or at least monthly. This will further minimize risk. Even if

your customer passes a link to somebody, it will be valid

only for a short time.

10) Provide a password protected product. Many of the Ebook

compilers support this method. You can also protect the

whole directory with a password. So that only the buyer will

get access. But you have to create an automated system to

add each user and to remove them after a specified time.

11) Display Visitor's IP address on Download page.

IP address is a unique number which identifies buyer's

computer to other computers on the internet. Displaying

buyer's IP Address on the order page is a good idea.

(You can say "We identified your IP Address: blah blah")

12) Use 'WebPage Protect Pro', a free software utility to

encrypt your HTML pages. This script will stuff JavaScripts

into your page to prevent Right Mouse-Click and will hide

Download Link URLs from the Status Bar. Download URL cannot

be retrieved by verifying the Encrypted HTML code easily.

You can download a free copy of this Tool from:

http://www.ecommercedealers.com/wpp/index.htm

13) Many Third Party products and services are available to

prevent unauthorized downloads. Some of such products are

listed here:

Digital Order Guard

http://www.ecommercedealers.com/cgi-bin/cb.pl?page=digoguard}

^{ClickBank Guard

http://www.ecommercedealers.com/cgi-bin/cb.pl?page=guard}

^{Easy-Download Protector

http://www.ecommercedealers.com/cgi-bin/cb.pl?page=howtocorp}

^{Click Locker

http://www.clicklocker.com/home.php}

^{You might use combination of all methods to get maximum

security and your eBusiness will be a great success.

Ali,

http://www.BePractical.com}

^{-----------------------------------------------------------

Ali is the Editor of 'Ebook Publishers Journal', a free

weekly Newsletter exclusively for Ebook Sellers, Marketers

and Authors. Send an email to Subscribe:

ebookpublishersjournal-subscribe@topica.com}

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