How to prevent deep linking to files on my website

Question

I own a website which contain a lot of freeware stuff to download on it. The problem I\'m facing is that people from around the world are taking the direct links of the fil

Answer 1

Your site is hosted by an Apache web server, so you should be able to do the following in your site's httpd.conf (or virtual host block)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com/  [NC]
RewriteRule   ^/PublicFiles/  /page-about-direct-links.html

That is basically saying:

1. Turn the mod_rewrite engine on
2. If the HTTP Referrer is not blank…
3. And doesn't contain my domain name (with or without “www.”)…
4. Redirect any requests for anything under /PublicFiles/ to /page-about-direct-links.html

More information on mod_rewrite can be found here: mod_rewrite - Apache HTTP Server