Your free site is up and running,
maybe you're submitting galleries to TGP's, and maybe you're even making
a few bucks here and there from your efforts. GREAT! But your work isn't
over just yet. Not by a longshot in fact. Did you know that there are thieves
out there that would love nothing better than to steal your bandwidth,
hotlink your content, and infiltrate your unprotected folders?
That's right, and it is mostly the
last one that I'll be concentrating on in this article.... Protecting your
folders. What does that mean, "your folders" exactly? Well, unless you
set up your website with only one level, as in no subfolders, your content
may be at risk. If you're like me you probably have a folder on your website
for banners, one for images, another for galleries, etc.If so, you need
to make sure to put an INDEX.html page inside each of those folders, so
that no one can link to all your content with one link. Note: having
htaccess alone will not prevent "indexers" from linking into your content
folders.
Who are they?
Indexers, or "Dexers" search the web
for unprotected "Dexes". When they find an index on someone's site that
contains a lot of pictures and movies they simply put up a link to the
"dex" on their site, thus letting all their surfers go in and look at the
content without the hassle of revenue ads or popups. The webmaster earns
nothing off this traffic but foots the bill for the bandwidth used.
What can you do to prevent this from
happening to your site? All too often webmasters forget or neglect to protect
their folders. What I do is I simply make up an index.html page, and I
put a simple "redirect" code in it. How it works is, whenever a snoopy
surfer decides to try and surf into one of the folders on my site, he gets
redirected automatically to the main page of my site (or whereever you
want to send them).
The code looks like this:
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd
html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<title>Your site tite</title>
</head>
<body onLoad=window.setTimeout("location.href='http://www.destination-site.com/'",01)>
</body>
</html>
"Destination site" = the site or page
you want to send these surfers.
"01" = the amount of time you want
for the redirection to take. 01 is virtually instantaneous. If you want
to put ads on the page and then delay the redirection just change the 01
to 10, or 20 etc.
Upload this little index.html page
into all of your unprotected folders on your site. Any folder without an
index.html page in it already should have this in it. Once you do that,
you have a little bit more peace of mind, and trust me, in this business
that is a good thing.
