There are some people that love to get online and snoop around your website to see what you have hidden inside your file folders. You know, the things that hold your content inside your web hosting space and give it a nice "shiny", uncluttered look? The little yellow folders!
The sad part is, if left unprotected it's as easy as going to eBay. Unlike going to eBay though, they won't have to pay one thin dime for anything they want that you've got.
There is a very simple techinque to protecting your files from some of those "snoopers". By making use of the correct CHMOD settings. Okay, you may not know what this is. At first, I didn't either. But, through making associations with other like minded people, I was clued in to this little protective "gem" if you will.
While most file folders you create on your hosting space are automatically given the chmod status of 755, this is unsafe for anything you place inside there. Especially digital downloadable items you're attempting to sell.
But, if you change this setting to 751, then the contents of the file folder remain hidden from prying eyes. Or at least for the most part they do.
Now, using this alone will not completely protect your file folders however. You should always, and I mean ALWAYS remember to put a file with the name of "index.html" or "index.htm" inside every single folder that resides on your web hosting space. The purpose of this is most inquisitive folks looking for a "free ride" so to speak will put in your URL path leading simply to your folder. Like this:
http://www.yoursitename.com/yourfolder/yourgoodstuff/
And then, if you don't have the above two securities in place, it's Thanksgiving! They've hit the jackpot. You being none the wiser, unless you constantly check your web statistics. Which most of us are a little too busy to do with running several businesses and such.
But, if you have the file folder chmod'ed to 751, they won't see anything inside of it. Add to that a blank, or whatever you want to put on it, index.htm page, that's all they'll see. No goodie gathering from you! They're blocked. Or at least to a point.
You would not believe how many digital resellers DON'T do this. It's mind boggling. Obviously, the CHMOD 751 trick won't work for every folder inside your web hosting space. Especially those that run specific scripts that need to be set at something different in order for the scripts to work.
If that's the case, then put your digital products inside their own file folder system. And we'll discuss how to do this in the next step.
One other note about "snoopers".
The term "snooper" isn't reserved for only people. Nope. Because search engines like Google excel at the act of snooping. They do this so they can index your pages throughout their own system. But, because they are merely machines, for lack of a better term, doing their jobs. Basically, they don't know the difference between your product download page and your blog. What I mean is, they see them all as content references they can index into their system.
So, what do you do? You add this line of code to all the .html or .htm pages you DON'T want included for indexing inside the search engines:
<meta name="robots" content="no index, no follow">
Where to put it? In between your <head></head> tags within your html code.
Also, it's important to understand that you should NOT be putting links to other websites inside your download pages. The reason for this should be obvious. If not, then here's the gist of it. . .If you place links to other websites, like www.WinZip.com or www.Adobe.com onto your download pages, the higher risk you run of your download page being found via online searches. So, just provide the link, don't make it "live", or clickable, if you must include them for your customers benefit.
