In Part I of this article I wrote on the common ways of protecting your digital downloads. Those methods involved changing your downloads folders every from time to time, modifying your robot.txt file, adding meta tags to your index files and compressing your files.
These methods are more common because they're free but that are not foolproof and there's no guarantee that your product is 100% protected using those methods. To get a better guarantee of protection involves using more advanced ways of providing protection for your digital downloads through scripts.
These scripts are 'programs' that keep going your host server and they work with your payment processor to ensure only authenticated customers have access to your download files i.e. those who have paid! I'll mention a few of those scripts in that article but it's fair to say that if you did a search through Google you'd probably find a lot of more like the ones I'll mention. The scripts I'll write about are those that I have personally used and can vouch for as far as their functionality.
The scripts I'm referring to are called (in no particular order) - DLGuard http://easypeasymarketing.com/recommends/DLGuard LinkLok LinkProtect
If you do a search on Google, you'll find the sites for each of those products. Although they're not as is script and they don't work as is way they do perform as is basic functions. They hide your download files from peeping toms and they prevent unauthorized access to your download files.
How do they do this?
Well without coming in the nitty gritty (because I wouldn't have a clue exactly how they do it) they do is allow you to store your download files outside of the 'web accessible' area of your web site. This means that they cannot be accessed via the web and can only be accessed via an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client like SmartFTP or WSFTP which requires password access. That also means that the search engines cannot 'see' them and list them in their databases.
So how does your paying customer get access to the download? Well the ONLY way they'll get access is through the script itself and the scripts are designed to ensure that payment was received BEFORE they give access. Each of the above scripts will give access via a download link that is generated by the script itself and that link changes each time a customer buys your product.
Added to that function is that each of the above scripts gives you the option of expiring the generated download link. That way your customer has a certain period of time to download before the link won't work anymore. These expiring links prevent your customer from 'sharing' their download link with family/friends/colleagues.
Finally, the next best way to protect your downloads is to have them protected by a username and password combination in the folder they are stored in ... but that's a whole new topic for another article.
Terry Jones owns and operates http://www.easywebresources.com.
His internet site offers hints and tips on setting up your internet site including script installations, script & tool reviews for your web success.
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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 wherever 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 ...
Terry Jones owns and operates http://www.easywebresources.com. His web site offers hints and tips on setting up your web site including script installations, script & tool reviews for your web success.
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