[markmarkymark]

Greetings All !

I'm new here and thought I would get right on with a little question.

The basic problem is this :

I have a website with a number of pages, hosted on a fasthosts windows server. One of my pages contains serveral link which link directly to some PDF files. These files are free to download. Google as spidered my site well.

If you do a search on specific terms google will more than likely bring up a direct link to the PDF files. Whilst this is not a problem in itself (after all I want them listed) it means that someone can go direct to the PDF file without visiting the page where the links are. Thus they do not get a chance to see what else is on offer etc. Furthermore, one could put a direct link to the PDF files and sponge I guess ....

What I am after is some simple way of enuring that the user has to obtain the PDF from the link page. What I want to avoid is a situation where they get put off if, for example, clicking on a google link to the PDF file leads to a 'page error' or similar. I thought about redirection but the PDF file is not a page its just a file ....

I thought about emedding the PDF file in an actual page some how - but not sure thats reliable ...

I can password protect a folder on my server, so I thought about password protected the PDF file - but giving the password on the web page. The problem with this is that if they try to view the PDF from a google search listing it will bring up the password box, and if they do not know it (which they will not !) then it might end in a page error (or you do not have permission to view this page etc). I think that might put people off ....

so, (sorry for rammble), anyone got any ideas / scrips which will help me achieve this in a simple way ....

thanks for reading !

cheers

Mark

[markmarkymark]

I might just add that what I think i'm trying to stop is hotlinking

Mark

[MadDog]

If you want to stop the search engine direct link make a robots.txt file and add the files that you dont want indexed.

If you dont know about a robot.txt file do a search on google, you can find lots of information on it.

[markmarkymark]

Originally Posted by MadDog

If you want to stop the search engine direct link make a robots.txt file and add the files that you dont want indexed.

If you dont know about a robot.txt file do a search on google, you can find lots of information on it.

Thanks ....

Actually I'm happy for them to be spidered. All I want is that then a spidered file is index, or where someone is sponging the file (as is also the case) they are directed to the download page rather than getting the file remotely .....

Bascically I have some pdf files for download. one organisation is linking directly to the file, rather then to the page where the file download links are. I am fine with them linking to the page, but not happy linking to the file direct ...

[digioz]

You can prevent hotlinking to the file by changing the setting on your server. But it depends on the type of server you are running. Could you give more information on that?

Alternatively, you can embed a JavaScript code in the PDF file itself. All you would have to do is to create a field with a white background on top of the contents of each page of your document and set it to ".hidden". You would then be able to create a tracking field with a bool value that is set to true if the user looks at the document directly but is set to false if the document is viewed through your index page. This value would determine if the content of the PDF file is viewable or not. The value of this tracking field would be set by initiating a ".fdf" file which imports a 0 value to the PDF document, which would in turn allow the user to see the contents of the PDF file.

If you didn't understand a word of what I just said, contact me at webmaster@digioz.com to talk about it. I would be willing to do this for you for a small fee if you need it.

Originally Posted by markmarkymark

Thanks ....

Actually I'm happy for them to be spidered. All I want is that then a spidered file is index, or where someone is sponging the file (as is also the case) they are directed to the download page rather than getting the file remotely .....

Bascically I have some pdf files for download. one organisation is linking directly to the file, rather then to the page where the file download links are. I am fine with them linking to the page, but not happy linking to the file direct ...

[nakulgoyal]

There are several download redirection scripts that you can use...!!