Information

The privacy of information on your site is particularly necessary, particularly if you are in a retail operation. Your files may not seem as serious as spy documents, but they still need to be given equal care.

A typical setup is that you have one or more sales pages for your product and when a prospect clicks on an order link they are redirected to PayPal, 2CheckOut or some other payment processing service. This setup is good for several reasons, the most important being the fact that you avoid having to deal with credit card numbers and other sensitive customer information. So far in 2007 there have been published reports of more than 89 million identity records exposed from data breaches. See the Identity Theft Resource Center for some really scary reading. Leaving data theft worries to companies who specialize in handling financial information is a great strategy for most small businesses.

But you still remain at risk after this, and if you are selling a product that can be downloaded you must be prepared with proper protections for your product. Many web site owners unknowingly end up leaving their products improperly protected, allowing anyone who is looking in the right place to get them for free.

Here are the 3 most common errors:

1. File identifiers simple to deduce.

If you have named your electronic book 'AdWords Secrets', do not include either 'Adwords' or 'Secrets' in the name. The location www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf is the first thing a user might try to access your work.

Making numbers such as a version number or date (example = AsWordsSecrets_v24.pdf, or AdwordsSecrets_20170606.pdf) as part of the filename will make the filename and corresponding URL much more difficult to figure out.

2. Search engines indexing the download page or the product itself.

Today's search engines are extremely efficient in spidering content on the web and keeping your web pages secret from search engines is becoming increasingly difficult. Even if you don't have any public links to your secret product download page there are several ways that a search engine can find out about the page and index it. Once it's indexed anyone who uses that search engine may see your product download page in the search results, and they can download your product for free.

Look up your site frequently to see what search engines are picking up about the site. With the larger search engines sites, you can look up by typing "operator yoursitename.com. This should give you a listing of all pages on your site that is indexed.

3.Txt robots constructed poorly.

On your web server, you will probably include a robots.txt file. This text file is used by most search engines and tells them what to index and what not to index. Typically, you will want to prevent search engines from looking at certain directories that you use for statistics reporting or downloads. Theoretically, this should mean that search engines won't index any hidden, non-public, or secret pages on your website. Unfortunately though, some hackers may try to view the robots.txt file. This could make you vulnerable to someone possibly downloading your product without paying.

You need to strike the right balance between protecting certain files and directories in robots.txt while not revealing too much about the structure of your web site.

Using the internet to transact commerce with items of a digital nature is a marvelous opportunity. To ensure that you receive payment for your hard work, consider these items and your own natural instincts.