It was thus said that the Great Sridhar Ayengar once stated:
Eric Smith wrote:
Dave Dunfield wrote:
I was wondering if you could explain to me what is
not clear about
this request, which is posted (bolded) at both the top and bottom
of my disk images page:
The problem is the usage model of the web. Just because something
happens to be on a page, at the top or bottom (or both), doesn't mean
that anyone is going to bother to read it.
Your URL randomization scheme is a (somewhat) reasonable way to prevent
deep linking. Expecting people not to do so simply out of respect for a
statement on a web page that they may or may not have actually read is
doomed to failure.
Dave,
You can always have your web server software check the referring URL for
all of your downloadable files to make sure that people are clicking
through your website. Not foolproof, but it'll work the vast majority
of the time.
And on the page you want people to hit first, add the following to the
<HEAD> section:
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
That means (to the search engines that respect it, like Google) to index
the contents of the page, but not to follow any links (like, to the
individual files).
-spc