How to Block Your Sales Page from the Search Engine

The answer is a lot easier then you think, and it will not cost you a penny of your money! Before we get started you will need a simple text editor (windows notepad will do) and an FTP Client. You will be uploading CGI script to your web site so I highly recommend you use dedicated FTP Client Software. I cannot guarantee that any other form of uploading this content will work.

Step 1:

Download the CGI Script "Download Protector" from http://www.phpscriptcenter.com/downloadprotector.php

This script is offered for FREE from the author but, you may pay a small fee of $4.99 to the author for support if you want to assist the author for providing such a great piece of software.

Unzip Download Protector into its own directory on your hard drive. In the directory were you unzipped the software you will find a file called download.php.

Open this file in your text editor.

Scroll down until you find this variable:

$ADMIN[defaulturl] =

This variable will redirect any web traffic to a page of your choice if they did not come from your merchant processor. I recommend you either send them to your purchase sales letter or if you want you can setup a new web page that warns them that their IP Address is being tracked and not to attempt to download without paying again. As an example we are sending them back to our main sales page. So the variable would look like this when completed:

$ADMIN[defaulturl] = "http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/sales.html";

Next we need to tell the script were the traffic that we want to view the page will be coming from. So the next variable you want to edit looks like this:

$okaysites =

You want to enter the URL of your merchant processor here. Any possible combination! *NOTE* Do not enter your own URL in this block or this will not work. You only want to allow traffic coming from your domain processor to access this page. In this example we are using ClickBank so our variable will look like this:

$okaysites = array("https://ssl.paytrack.com","http://www.clickbank.net","http://clickbank.net);

*NOTE* The above information for ClickBank was current as of this writing but is subject to change. If this does not seem to work after you are completed contact ClickBank for current information.

Now we are not only going to block your thank you page from being accessed by people that did not pay for it. We are also going to block it from being able to be put into search engine results. So you want to upload your thank you page into your cgi-bin directory on your server. So our next variable looks like this:

$ADMIN[url_1] =

Here is were we tell the script were the real location of you thank you page is. Because we are putting it in our cgi-bin directory this will look like this:

$ADMIN[url_1] = "http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin";

If you have multiple products that you are selling from the same web site you can protect each of them by changing the [url_1] block. Here is an example:

$ADMIN[url_1] = "http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin";
$ADMIN[url_2] = "http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin";
$ADMIN[url_3] = "http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin";

Save your work. Make sure you just hit save. Do not change the file type to .txt when you save it. Make sure you save it as the original download.php.

Step 2:

Open your text editor again with a blank page and enter the following lines exactly as shown only changing your domain (URL) information:

# /robots.txt file for http://www.yourdomain.com/

#This file is used to allow crawlers to index our site.
#It is NOT used for any other purpose, such as filtering
#impressions or clicks.

Much like cgi scripts the "#" symbol is designated as a remark. Therefore you can ad any additional information you desire although nothing else is required for this part.

You will now enter the information you would like the search engines not to spider or ad to their search result listings. There are advanced ways of doing this so you can specify which search engine will be allowed to see what content but for the purpose of this tutorial we are going to make it applicable to all search engine robots.

For the following example we are going to block all search engines from viewing our images and cgi-bin directory (which contains the thank you page.)

Enter the following information directly after the last line from above:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /cgi-bin

The completed file will look like this:

# /robots.txt file for http://www.yourdomain.com/

#This file is used to allow crawlers to index our site.
#It is NOT used for any other purpose, such as filtering
#impressions or clicks.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /cgi-bin

When completed entering the information save the file as " robots.txt ".

Step 3:

Open your FTP Client and Log-In to your domain hosting account. Upload download.php into your cgi-bin directory. If you have not already upload all of your thank you pages into the cgi-bin directory as well. Make sure you CHMOD the thank you pages so that they are viewable in a web browser.

Upload the robots.txt file into the root directory of your domain.

Now the only thing you have left to do is change the return links from your merchant processor to point to the script. Here is the proper URL to point to our first and second sales pages in our example:

http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin/download.php?site=1&file=thankyou.html
http://www.dontstealmydownloads.com/cgi-bin/download.php?site=2&file=thanks.html

Congratulations! You are now blocking search engines from indexing your sales pages, and nobody can access them unless they paid for it!

*WAIT* What if my page is already showing up in the search engine results?

There are a few options available. You can delete the page (not recommended). You can request the search engine remove it from the index (not recommended). Or you can take advantage of the placement by changing the content of the page. BUT, make sure it is not a drastic change. Your best bet is to keep it sort of a thank you page. Just remove your download link. Change the wording to something like, "Thank you for your interest in purchasing....", and then ad your sales letter or tell them where to go to get more information!

Find more information about web site security at FFAMall Web Search

You may freely reprint this article on your website provided the following caption remains intact:

"This article courtesy of http://search.ffamall.com/, the web search experts. Find what want on the Internet at FFAMall Web Search!