How To Keep The Information On Your Site Safe

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 are not quite out of the woods yet. As a vendor of a digital "soft product" that can be bought and downloaded straight away, you have to guard against digital shoplifting. There's lots of ways that people in your position leave their website goods on display, unattended - leaving people to make off with them without paying, if they know how. Here are the 3 most common errors: 1. File identifiers simple to deduce. If the title of your e-book is 'AdWords Secrets', then don't name the file AdWordsSecrets.pdf. It is just too easy to guess that the URL for downloading your e-book might be www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf 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. Indexing the product itself or the download page is the function of search engines. With an increase in efficiency of today's search engines it has become quite difficult to keep any website a secret from search engines. Even without public links accessing your product download page there are other ways for a search engine to discover it and index it. After it has been indexed anyone using that search engine will find your product download page information in their search results, making them able to download your product without charge. It is important to frequently survey what information the search engines have on your site. Most of the larger purveyors have an operator command, e.g. site: example.com, which will detail everything about that location that a web spider has crawled over and stored. 3. Improperly configured robots.txt robots.txt is a text file that you can place on your web server to guide search engines to what content they are allowed to index and what is off limits. While this may prevent most search engines from indexing your secret web pages, it opens up another vulnerability: any curious web surfer is able to view your robots.txt file. If the file explicitly forbids search engines from looking in the /downloads or /report directories, then it's very likely that's where the secret files are stored. With this knowledge the web surfer can more easily find your product and download it for free. It is important to maintain the proper balance between protection of your files and directories in robots.txt and not allowing too much information about the structure of your site out. Digital products are a great item to sell online. Be sure that you are getting paid for the items you have put the time into creating by using the guidelines listed above. These will help you be successful.