Posts Tagged ‘unauthorized downloads’

Unfortunately, one of the most common problems faced by web marketers that seriously cuts into profits is the issue of unauthorized downloads from their download pages and download directories.

Just imagine your irritation when you discover that the $97 product that you have sold 500 times has actually been downloaded 578 times (all from different IP addresses)… that constitutes a loss of $2716… Yipes, that’s one heck of a loss!

And how did it happen?

Well, there are plenty of ways that it can happen.

1. Search engines indexing your download page and people finding it
2. Individuals finding your download directory
3. Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

I am going to handle these one by one.

Search engines indexing your download page

Because search engines often crawl your site, if you add a download page they are going to find it. However, how do you stop them from indexing that page? Aha, that is really simple… all you need is the tiny meta tag below added to the header section of your download page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

This tag tells search engines to ignore your download page and not include it in their index. If it isn’t in their index then no unscrupulous rip-off artist can notice it and download your merchandise without authorization

People finding your download directory

Some unscrupulous folks will visit an ecommerce web site then add a simple /download or /downloads to the end of the URL and if the owner hasn’t been a little clever then the result can be a page containing hyperlinks directly to the downloadable files

The way to stop this is to add a simple index.htm or index.html file to the directory. Browsers automatically look for these files and load them if they’re present. That way, if somebody goes to the directory, whatever content you have put on that page will appear rather than the directory contents… mine has a blank page. It’s in all probability also a smart idea to name the directory something utterly obscure, you could give the directory some totally screwy name like ad9cy45jm or whatever that no-one would ever guess would be a download directory. A combination of those two is most likely a good idea just in case somebody has a method of working around the index page.

Note that the index.html page works even with a directory inside a blog… for instance, visit http://automatedblogpostingsoftware.com/downloads and a page with some stupid text meant as a joke will be generated… that is the index.html page on one of Julia’s blogs (Note: This is NOT her download directory, it is a complete decoy LOL)

Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with on-line bookmarking services

This is the third means by which unauthorised people will access your product downloads. Unfortunately, this is also the toughest one to combat. Folks are allowed to bookmark their download page and it is a perfectly legitimate thing to try simply in case something goes wrong with the first download.

To beat this downside you need software that issues a temporary download link that is only active for a certain amount of time or a certain number of downloads. One such software program is Smartdd (short for ‘smart digital download’). Click here for additional info on SmartDD now!

I hope this post has helped you understand how unauthorized downloads occur and the way to guard your products from the strategies used by unscrupulous people to rip off your hard earned profits!