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Protect Your ClickBank Products from Online Theft
Written By: Tim Coulter
One of the biggest problems faced by ClickBank merchants is
the risk of content theft - people downloading their digital
products without paying for them.
To gain illicit access to downloadable product files,
determined content thieves exploit a range of security
weaknesses, each of which can be eliminated if the correct
protective measures are applied. Here, we will look at just
one area of vulnerability and a simple precaution that any
ClickBank merchant can use to protect against it.
Most ClickBank merchants understand that there should never
be links to downloadable product files and thank-you pages
from the other pages on their website. The only way to
access a product file should be via its thank-you page,
which likewise should be accessible only via the ClickBank
payment process. Observance of these simple guidelines will
ensure that there is no way to navigate directly to your
downloadable content.
This approach also ensures that the thank-you page will not
be indexed by search engine spiders, which is essential, as
nothing could be more harmful to product security than a
thank-you page with a #1 Google ranking!
However, we should not overlook the risk that your thank-you
page and product file URLs may be distributed in underground
newsgroups and forums. While this may not necessarily lead
to an immediate avalanche of illicit downloads, the risk
exists that the forum posting will eventually be indexed by
a search engine and that this will provide an indirect route
by which the thank-you page itself becomes indexed.
Astonishingly, the solution proposed by some so-called web
security experts is to list your thank-you pages in your web
server's robots.txt file - a configuration file that informs
search engines which pages should be excluded from
indexing.
It's true that this approach usually prevents indexing of
the thank-you pages. But it creates an even greater weakness
- it provides any would-be hacker with easy access to the
exact names and locations of all your supposedly hidden files.
It cannot be over-emphasized - never list your product files
or delivery pages in your web server's robots.txt file! To
explicitly stop a thank-you page being indexed by spiders,
use the following Meta tag in the head element of each
thank-you page:
meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /
Although a search engine may discover your thank-you pages
by some indirect route, it will silently ignore any page
that contains the above Meta tag.
Of course, this is just one of several vulnerabilities that
expose your downloadable products to the risks of theft. In
chapter 21 of "ClickBank - The Definitive Guide", I examine
the whole gamut of techniques that online thieves use to
steal your merchandise and I describe several of the most
effective ways in which this problem can be tackled.
Copyright © Tim Coulter. All rights reserved.
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Tim Coulter is a consultant and software developer who
helps netpreneurs to harness marketing technologies.
He is also the author of "ClickBank - The Definitive Guide"
The Ultimate ClickBank Tutorial & Reference Manual.
http://www.clickbankrevealed.com/
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