Do you have a squeeze page for a Free PDF or a digital product and want to know the fastest, simplest way to upload and protect it?

A customer of mine asked me that question today and I thought it would make a good newbie topic.   I covered a download page before in this post, but this is slightly different.

First, I’m going to assume you have your own domain, and do actually know how to upload.  Either via FTP or Cpanel.

Let’s use a PDF as an example.

Step 1. You’ve got a squeeze page and you want to give those who enter their name and email address a free download.

The first thing you should do is “Zip” the PDF for storage online.   You don’t want to upload a “.pdf” file to your domain because Google can index it.

So locate the PDF on your hard drive and right-click it.   Then click: Send To > Compressed Zipped Folder

This will create a zip file with the same name as your PDF.

Step 2

Open up Notepad and save a blank file as “index.html” (change Save as type to: all files)

You need this so your visitors can’t see all the files listed in your download directory.

Step 3

Create a folder on your domain and give it a unguessable name..

Like  dl239x41tu

Step 4

For extra protection create a robots.txt file

This is a file that’s stored in your public_html folder and tells search engines not to index certain files and directories.

In Notepad again paste:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dl239w41tu/

Save as:  robots.txt

This blocks the search engines from indexing anything in that directory.

Step 5

Upload the robots.txt file to your public_html folder

Upload index.html and your Zip file to your dl239w41tu folder

Once you do the above your zip file will be located in a folder like

http://yourdomain.com/dl239w41tu/filename.zip

And it will be protected as best as possible without using any other scripts and coding.