As a Clickbank vendor I have always known that a real weakness with Clickbank is their thank you page requirements. Because of those requirements it’s possible for search engines to find your Clickbank thank you page. Then anyone who does the right Google search can find your thank you page and download your product for free.

This has lead to a lot of Clickbank thank you page theft.

I thought I was immune to this since I because I used cryptic names for download folders and download file names. Plus I used the robots.txt file to keep the search engines from finding my download page.

I knew there we download protection scripts that were supposed to protect your Clickbank downloads from theft, but I didn’t think I needed them.

Well, while checking my web site stats in cpanel, I noticed a large number of search terms that lead me to believe that people were searching for my Clickbank thank you page.

I took those search terms and typed them into Google and then looked for my Clickbank product domain name. Sure enough, there was my download page for anyone to find, to goto, and to steal my product.

It’s hard to say how many people actually went to the page and downloaded the products. Out of around 70 searches, how many stole my products? It’s hard to say, but I’m sure I lost some money and could have potentially lost a lot more.

So, to remedy this, I did a couple of things.

First, I changed my download folder.

There is a standard bit of text that Clickbank likes to see on your thank you page. That required text is part of the problem. I’m not going to mention that text here, because I don’t want people searching for it.

So, I took that text from my thank you page and turned it into an image instead of text. I then changed my thank you page to use the image, so search engines can no longer find that text.

I need to find a good thank you page protector that works with Clickbank for long term protection, but hopefully the above will work for now.

Since my old thank you page was now listed in the search engines and people were going there to get a “free” product, I decided to try to turn that page into something good.

I turned it into a lead capture page. Basically, I tell them they have been caught trying to steal my product. Then I explain I am not angry and to reward their resourcefulness, I offer them a real free product in exchange for an email address.

You can see that page here:

http://www.affiliate-payday.com/hlg-dn/

We’ll see how that goes.

So, I can think of a couple of lessons to be learned from this incident.
1. If you are a Clickbank vendor, you need to be aware of how insecure your thank you page could be.
2. Check those web stats at least monthly and look for unusual activity.

Mike

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