This is a common mistake for beginners. They upload an ebook to the SBI servers, and sometime later discover the download page is indexed! The usual advice is to put in a "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" meta tag, but that's not enough.

For a start, no spider HAS to respect the nofollow tag, and in fact very few of them do. If you want proof, then try this.

Go to Yahoo Search (they don't take notice of the tag) and do a search for "thankyou for downloading" or words to that effect. You will be returned a long list of thankyou pages, with free downloads of every type of product. You have in fact bypassed the payment page, and found the actual download location. (I hope you would't actually download what you find, this was only to show how the backdoor is often left open!)

The Robots.txt File

This is what sitesell have to say about altering this file.

Be careful, this one is dangerous and we do not support it at SiteSell Support if you have problems or questions. This is geeky optional stuff, so you are on your own.

However, if you follow these instructions to the letter, then everything will be fine. And it will be explained in "non geeky" terms, so don't worry! Sitesell provide a robots.txt file that looks like this.

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /bin/
Crawl-delay: 30

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /bin/
Crawl-delay: 30

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /bin/

This Is What You Do

Firstly, copy the above into a plain text editor, such as notepad. Either that, or put www.yoursite.com/robots.txt into a browser, and copy/paste the file that comes up.

When the new file is uploaded, it is going to overwrite the existing one, so we need to make sure that information is included again.

Next, add this onto the bottom of it.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /download-page.html

The star is a wildcard, meaning ALL spiders are excluded. And of course, you change download-page.html to the correct name. Make sure you use the correct case...the best idea is to name your page with all lower case, and then do the same with the txt file.

You can also protect pages by using the wildcard, just in case someone is smart enough to go poking around in your files to see what there. If the download page is named hfgrt534sr.html for eg, then you could use

User-agent: * Disallow: /hfgr*

That would block access to all files starting with hfgr so the page is unlikely to be found peeking into your robots file. Then, save the file as robots.txt (all lower case)

Now all you have to do, is upload it, using txt it! in Site Central. Easy.

Some Extra Measures

For those that want to take extra measures, or don't wish to alter the robots.txt file, here's a few tips

*Be careful about the download page name.
You wouldn't name it "thank-you.html", now would you? Or something equally guessable. Think people don't try obvious names like that, if they know you have a download page, and don't want to pay?
*Encrypt your Pay Now button
This is the default setting for Paypals pay Now, so don't change it. But check anyway to make sure the download page isn't shown in the source code.
*Add the NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW meta tag.
This shouldn't be neccessary, but it won't hurt to have it. Plus, don't have meta tags for keywords, description etc. They are for pages you WANT to be indexed.

*The Best Little Tip Of All!

Let's assume all your efforts have been in vain. the robots.txt file fails, as does the NOINDEX in the head of your page. The worst has happened, and your page has been indexed. (don't worry that won't really happen)

In that case, how will someone find you in the search engines? By searching for words you are likely to have used on the page, of course. "thank you for downloading" "thank you for your purchase" etc. So......don't give the search engines any text to index. simple!

Put your text onto an image instead. And avoid the word "thank you" in the title and file name. What search engine is going to think the page worthy of ranking in their search results? Or if it does, the you will be so far down the list nobody will ever find you.

Another Option

If your serious about stopping theft, you might want to look at something like DLGuard. This is not an afilliate link, it's simply here to give you the option of looking at it.

Personally I have never found the need for investing the $127 needed. But then again, Im not dealing in huge sums of money!

If you found this, or any other pages to be useful to you, why not let me know? Also, anything else you would like to see, let me know that too.