Sort of a catch-22 here.

Basically I want to sell an ebook. That means after payment through PayPal, I want to send people to a page in my site to download the file from.

Obviously I don't want that page indexed, so I should have a robots.txt file, right?

But then the robot.txt file is available for public viewing and anyone with half a brain can see where the file is anyway.

Any thoughts?

 

zip the ebook and set a password on it?

 

You dont need a robots file.txt file.

Create a .Net/ php page with a small onload event handler. If they provide the correct code then the page actually servs up your ebook, if they dont give the correct code they simply get a html page saying the code is invalid.

Normally you would restrict either the duration or number of downloads each code is allowed to make to prevent people from advertising/ selling it after purchase.

 

I still think just zipping it with a password would be much easier though.

 

Thanks for the replies. The problem with zipping it and having a password is that when someone orders the book through paypal, I don't think there's a way to give them the password.

 

Ah right, so your not planning on being in contact with these people?

 

If you are selling through paypal then you either setup a script on your site to send the email with the password/ url or unique url in response to the IPN call that paypal makes or just include the password in the conformation email from PayPal (i think)

 

you could try using an autoresponder so when you get an email saying that they paid, your computer sends them an email with a password.