How to Protect Digital Products from Unauthorized Download

Unfortunately, one of the most common issues faced by internet 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 50 times has actually been downloaded 78 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 several ways it can happen.

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

I'll deal with these one by one.

Search engines indexing your download page

Because search engines regularly crawl your site, if you add a download page they are going to find it. But how do you stop them from indexing that page? Aha, that's actually simple... all you need is the little meta tag below added to the head section of your download page.

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

This tag causes 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 find it and download your products without authorization

People finding your download directory

Some unscrupulous people will visit an ecommerce site then add a simple /download or /downloads to the end of the URL and if the owner hasn't been a little smart then the result will 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 are present. That way, if someone goes to the directory, whatever you have put on that page will appear rather than the directory contents... mine has a blank page. It's probably also a good idea to name the directory something completely obscure, you could give the directory some completely screwy name like ad9cy45jm or whatever that no-one would ever guess would be a download directory. A combination of these two is probably a good idea just in case someone has a way of working around the index page.

Note that the index.html page works even with a directory inside a blog... for example, visit http://automatedblogpostingsoftware.com/downloads and a page with some stupid text intended as a joke will be generated... that is my index.html page (Note: This is NOT my download directory, it's a complete decoy LOL)

Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

This is the third way that unauthorised people can access your product downloads. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest one to combat. People are allowed to bookmark their download page and it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do just in case something goes wrong with the first download.

To overcome this problem you need software that issues a temporary download link that is only active for a certain period of time or a certain number of downloads. One such software program is Smartdd (short for 'smart digital download'). Click here for more info on SmartDD now!

I hope this post has helped you understand how unauthorized downloads occur and how to protect your products from the methods used... Here is to profitable online ventures!