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The privacy of information on your site is particularly necessary, particularly if you are in a retail operation. Your files may not seem as serious as spy documents, but they still need to be given equal care.

A typical setup is that you have one or more sales pages for your product and when a prospect clicks on an order link they are redirected to PayPal, 2CheckOut or some other payment processing service. This setup is good for several reasons, the most important being the fact that you avoid having to deal with credit card numbers and other sensitive customer information. So far in 2007 there have been published reports of more than 89 million identity records exposed from data breaches. See the Identity Theft Resource Center for some really scary reading. Leaving data theft worries to companies who specialize in handling financial information is a great strategy for most small businesses.

But that does not leave you totally in the clear. If you are selling a digital product that the customer can download immediately after the purchase, you need to ensure that the product is protected. There are many ways that web site owners inadvertently leave their valuable products unprotected - making them available for free to anyone who knows where to look.

Here are the 3 most common errors:

1. Easy to guess filenames.

If the title of your e-book is 'AdWords Secrets', then don't name the file AdWordsSecrets.pdf. It is just too easy to guess that the URL for downloading your e-book might be www.example.com/AdWordsSecrets.pdf

At least add a version number or a date into the filename, e.g. AdWordsSecrets_v42.pdf or AdWordsSecrets_20070707.pdf. This will make it much more difficult to guess the filename and the URL.

2. Indexing the product itself or the download page is the function of search engines.

With an increase in efficiency of today's search engines it has become quite difficult to keep any website a secret from search engines. Even without public links accessing your product download page there are other ways for a search engine to discover it and index it. After it has been indexed anyone using that search engine will find your product download page information in their search results, making them able to download your product without charge.

Look up your site frequently to see what search engines are picking up about the site. With the larger search engines sites, you can look up by typing "operator yoursitename.com. This should give you a listing of all pages on your site that is indexed.

3. An inadequately constructed Robots.txt

robots.txt is a text file that you can place on your web server to guide search engines to what content they are allowed to index and what is off limits. While this may prevent most search engines from indexing your secret web pages, it opens up another vulnerability: any curious web surfer is able to view your robots.txt file. If the file explicitly forbids search engines from looking in the /downloads or /report directories, then it's very likely that's where the secret files are stored. With this knowledge the web surfer can more easily find your product and download it for free.

You need to strike the right balance between protecting certain files and directories in robots.txt while not revealing too much about the structure of your web site.

Selling digital products online is a great business. Make sure that you get paid for the products that you have painstakingly created by following the guidelines above and applying common sense.