When you sell digital information products, ebooks, reports or anything where you want to provide immediate access after purchase from a “Thank You” page, then you need to think about how to secure your Thank you page which may include:

• Keeping search engines from indexing your Thank You page
• Making your thank you page hard to find
• Allowing a script or program to only allow access to the download links on your thank you page to specific customers
• Not including download links on your thank you page at all…instead sending them out of band

Here are 4 ways we have used to secure our thank you pages in the past.

1. Avoid including direct download links on your thank you page…in this case your buyer is forwarded to a Thank You page that simply  acknowledges the order and tells them of the next steps.  How do you get them the download instructions then?

a) The simplest way is to link your autoresponder to your order entry cart (1ShoppingCart allows this for example) where an automated message gets sent to customers once the order is processed informing them of the location and username/password for downloading your files.  This does depend on you setting up a username and password through your webhost control panel for the directory where your files are stored.  While not the most secure (as there is only one username/pswd for the directory at a time which all customers use), this is a good method for most digital infoproducts.

b) A more secure method is to use a method where each customer gets their own unique, time limited, obscured link to the downloads – using the 1ShoppingCart digital download protection function or a product like DLGuard (which will work with Clickbank and Paypal) will serve this purpose in a highly effective and automated way

2.  Include Meta Tags on your Thank You page (html) that tell the search engines you don’t want that page indexed…
[code]<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”>[/code\] While this is not foolproof since some search engines have a spotty record of paying attention to the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW attributes, it will lessen the chances of your Thank You pages being found through search

3. Use hard-to-guess names for your Thank You page. Many people name their Thank you page using obvious page names such as http://www.yourdomain.com/thankyou.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/download.html  – these can be easily guessed, so instead using something like http://www.yourdomain.com/xrty-382.html  where the chances of guessing your Thank You page are virtually null

4. Change your thank you page name frequently – say once each week will keep people from telling others about your download page and will make it harder for someone to find you on a frequent basis.

When you get started you may want to begin with options 2-4, but eventually you will want to move to either option 1a or 1b. If you have the small investment for using 1ShoppingCart that would be my first choice since they also give you a built in autoresponder, ad-tracking module, affiliate management as well as a very full-feature shoppingcart…DLGuard would be another option if you were not ready to move to 1ShoppingCart yet