Today is Armand Morin’s birthday. I was searching online for some information I’m going to be presenting to him when I see him at his new Brave The Wave event in Las Vegas next week. (This event is completely free if you’d like to join us on the weekend of January 30-31.) In my Google search I used the filetype:pdf term to locate some specific information, and I still can’t believe what came up. This is the search term you use when you are searching for PDF files on a specific topic or from a particular person.
My search returned hundreds of files that should have been on protected pages. There were eBooks, short reports, and other content that is currently for sale on the Internet. Obviously the people whose information I found have not had Armand’s training, and do not use a webmaster who understands the importance of doing this on your download pages.
Ask your webmaster about protecting your PDF’s and other files by putting them on a download page that will not be indexed, or use a membership site to deliever all of your sensitive data. I use the WordPress membership site software plugin for most of my downloads these days. When you create information products and sell them on the Internet, it is your responsibility to make sure they are not available in a Google search for just anyone to download.
Connie
You had talked before about protecting your PDF’s in one of your
courses. Now I have a better idea but not sure how membership
sites work. Do you use that only when your downloading to
a particular group only (who are members)?
Ruthan
Ruthan
A membership site is the best and easiest solution, but I was playing around with Adobe Acrobat and saw that you could create security settings that supposedly would allow you to encrypt the file and prevent search engines from accessing the metadata.
Anyone try this?
Connie, From things I have heard, I have thought that using the membership site link you provide would give the most protection for downloads. You have confirmed that.
Thank you.
Kathryn