If by any chance you sell digital media on your blog you may relate to this. Ever wondered why the download counter of your products keeps going up even though the number of sales does not tally up with it?

I guess we all learn through our mistakes or negligence and once bitten we are twice shy, so we take precautions to safeguard our rights and products. In order to do so one must first of all understand how things work, especially with blogs. As we all know blogs are content driven and Google love such sites and thus index them quickly and rank them high in the search results.

In itself that is a good thing but if you sell digital media on your blog then you most certainly don’t want Google or any search engine to index your thank you or download pages. It’s easy to make it known to the search engines not to index certain pages by using meta tags on the specific page. In case you don’t how to here is one method to use, somewhere at the top of your page insert <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> followed by your content. That should work with all the search engines .

It is also important to know how your download or thank you page can get compromised. If you have made the mistake of not protecting the page then the chances are it is freely available to be found on the search engines. And the crooks have their conniving ways to discover such pages by doing a simple search. At this point I must stress that this is for educational purpose and in no way am I suggesting you and use it for any other reasons what so ever.

So how do the thieves find your pages from the search engines? A simple search by keywords or long-tail key-phrase may not return the unprotected pages in the search results and if they do then they are probably somewhere on page 200 or there about. But in a crafty way these cyber thieves have found ways to bring those pages to the forefront and therefore easier for them to steal your products.

Here is how its done and if you are like me keep an eye on your stats and search terms to see what brings the unwanted guests. If you see anything like this [ intext:"Thank You For Your Order" intext:PLR ] then my friend know that your thank you / download page(s) have been compromised and more than likely a theft has been committed. Go ahead as a learning experience type (without the [ ] ) the above in Google and analyse the results.

You have two choices if you sell digital media on your site/blog

1. Tell the search engines not to index certain pages by using the meta tags <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
2. Purchase yourself one of the expensive download page protector software or use a paid download service.

Once you have the above meta tag in place Google for one gives this promise:

When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.

Furthermore Google states:

Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there’s a small chance that Googlebot won’t see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it’s probably because we haven’t crawled your site since you added the tag. (Also, if you’ve used your robots.txt file to block this page, we won’t be able to see the tag either.)

If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. To expedite removal, use the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

So take a good look at your stats especially the search terms by which your visitors come to your site/blog. And if you see the “intext” with “Thank You For Your Order” anywhere you know what is going on and now have a pretty good idea of what to do about it.

I hope this information has been of help! If you know of other ways to protect ones e-property please take a moment to leave a comment and share with us – we can all learn from each other and stay safe together.