The biggest problem that the ClickBank merchants have ever faced is the grave risk of content theft. The contents on your site may get stolen affecting your ways of making some easy extra money online. This precisely happens when people download digital products without paying for themselves.

The sole purpose that lies at the root of this mal-action is the purpose to gain illegitimate right use the downloadable product files. Involved culprits are the indomitable content thieves who take advantage of a range of security weaknesses. You will be happy to know that all of these security loopholes can be did away with if the correct defending measures are applied.

Ways to Avoid Theft

Let's discuss the primary area of susceptibility in this context along with a simple safety measure that any ClickBank merchant can use to protect any sort of online theft. Observing the following list of simple guidelines will make sure that there are no ways left via which one can navigate directly to the downloadable content on your site.

Most of the ClickBank merchants comprehend that they should never put links to those product files that can be downloaded.

Same goes for the thank-you pages which should never have links from the other pages on their website.

The sole way via which one would be able to access a product file is through the "Thank You" page of the site. And that again should be accessible only via the ClickBank payment process.

On the other hand, you cannot afford to overlook the risk that your "Thank-you Page" and the product file URLs may get circulated amongst underground newsgroups and forums. Now that may not immediately cause any problem with immediate illegitimate downloads but then the risk remains, risk in the context that the forum posting may gradually get indexed by a search engine. That again may provide an indirect route which indexes the "Thank you Page" itself.

Approaching Web Security Norms

Surprisingly, the way out that some experts propose according to some so-called web security norms is to enlist your thank-you pages in your web server's robots.txt file. Let it be a configuration file that informs search engines about particular pages should be excluded from indexing. This approach at times may prevent the indexing of the "Thank you Pages". But then it has a demerit as well. This approach at time creates a more intense weakness. It provides any prospective hacker with an easy access to the accurate names and locations of all your apparently hidden files. Unfortunately, it cannot be over-emphasized, so it is better never to list your product files or delivery pages in your web server's robots.txt file.

Here's a little solution for you. To overtly prevent a "Thank-you Page" from being indexed by spiders, you can make use of the following Meta tag in the element of each "Thank-you Page" on your site:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

Even though a search engine may discover your "Thank-you Pages" by chance through some indirect route, you do not have to worry as it will wordlessly ignore any page that contains the above Meta tag. So, that can be an easy way to safeguard your "Thank you Pages." Though you may prepare a unique site for ways to make extra money online yet such disadvantages may affect your growth. So it is better for you to be careful.

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