Five Step Guide to Secure an Affiliate Program or Members Area

It’s been a busy weekend but I thought this post would sum up a few things I’ve witnessed recently. I’m still surprised at how many people don’t follow basic rules of practice whenever they’re selling a product online via an Affiliate Program.

When I say basic rules of practice I mean protecting your Affiliate Links & also protecting your Downloads Area.

An interesting case first happened on Thursday when someone spotted that the Day Job Killer website had left its downloads section opened to the Search Engines, meaning Google had cached & indexed the whole PDF.

If you’re selling a product or service that is as easily distrubuted as an ebook one would think that you’d keep the downloads section off limits to search engine spiders?

Another thing that I noticed is that many Vendors who run affiliate programs don’t protect their affiliate links from the search engine spiders either. Therefore the affiliate links can get indexed & end up outranking the main domain. Which is something we can see happening when you do a search for Comment hut….in google.

What does this mean?

Well everytime someone searches for Comment hut then goes to buy it from the real domain they are actually paying an affiliate half the commission. So technically the guys are losing $50 on EVERY Sale. Ouch.

Here’s the Earners Blog quick guide to making sure this doesn’t happen to you:

1. Use Options -Indexes in your .htaccess file

The command Options -Indexes will stop any virtual directory listing & give a 404 when someone tries to list a directory that you don’t have an index.php or index.html file in. This also stops search engine spiders from crawling through all those open directories.

Simply open up your .htaccess file in an ftp program & add the line anywhere:

Options -Indexes

2. Password Protect the Area with a .htaccess file

Firstly to do this you need to a create a file called .htpasswd, you may have trouble naming it this on your desktop so create htpasswd then upload it & rename it to .htpasswd. Now in this file you want to just put the username & password you want to use to get access to the folder in the format (you can have multiple users on mulitple lines):

user:pass

Once you’ve done that create a .htaccess file with the following code:

AuthUserFile /usr/local/you/protecteddir/.htpasswd

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName EnterPassword

AuthType Basic

require user yourusernamefromhtpasswd

The first line is the full server path to where your .htpasswd is located then the require user line is where you put the username that you allocated in .htpasswd. Now place the .htaccess file in the folder that you want protected & you should be asked for a Username & Password to give you access

3. Blocking off the folders with Robots.txt

Robots.txt is important as it helps you keep spiders out of important sections of your website. It’s important to remember with robots.txt is that it must always reside in the root of your domain. So here’s what a robots.txt would look like to keep people out of a directory called protected

User-agent: *
Disallow: /protected/

Robots.txt is one method to stop search engines from indexing your affiliate links like we saw with Comment hut. However you would need to have the affiliate script in a /cgi-bin/ directory then restrict access to that directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This would stop any affiliate links getting indexed & would also prevent the affiliate link outranking the main site.

4. Using a 301 redirect on Affiliate Links

Say for example an affiliate link is outranking your main site, what can you do about it? Well the best way to tackle this problem would be to place a 301 redirect inside your affiliate script or even use .htaccess to 301 redirect all affiliate links to the homepage. This will mean that after a few weeks (sometimes sooner) the links won’t rank anymore & should disappear.

The reason the affiliate link outranks the main page is generally due to link popularity. When an affiliate program doesn’t redirect properly & the search engine spiders visit the referral link it actually generates a new page. An exact copy of the homepage. Without a 301 redirect in place the search engines will index this link & they’ll rank whichever one has the most link popularity. In this case, the affiliates. This can also lead to potential duplicate content issues.

5. Password Protect Your PDF Files

If you’re selling a pdf ebook it’s a no brainer really that you should be password protecting the content. That is the single easiest way to stop someone that you don’t want to read it from reading it.

Utilising these 5 simple steps could quite easily stop you from losing hundreds if not thousands of dollars in Affiliate Revenue.