4 Tips on Securing Your Landing Pages from Theft

When looking for new ideas regarding landing pages, one thing comes to a lot of people’s mind: scrape and copy. I’m not and advocate of scraping, but some individuals simply have no idea where to start with a new angle or niche offer and I understand that. Taking a look at what someone else has created in order to get an idea of what may and may not work isn’t harmful. We all had to start somewhere.

Plain copy-pasting of another person’s idea without any sort of personal tweak should be highly discouraged. I say this not merely from a standpoint of integrity, but because I know how much of a bummer it is when a really profitable angle and layout gets stolen. If you haven’t taken the time to at least make an effort to safeguard your landing pages against scraping, then you have no one else to blame for your loss.

Here are a few ways to combat this.

1). Regularly Switch Domains

Once your landing pages have been out there for a while, some scrapers may begin to notice a trend and actually seek out your domain name to find other landers that appear. Switching out your domain keeps you ahead of the game and decreases the likelihood that anyone will catch on to your landers (unless you have a very typical style of lander, in which case I urge you to try out new styles).

The more traffic you get, the more frequently you should change out your domain name. For people using T202 or CPVLab whose domain hosts their tracking, however, this may come as an obstacle. For that, you can create CName in your DNS directory to create a domain alias for your landing page. This process can be a little tricky, so make sure you contact your host before messing with this too much to ensure that you don’t create erroneous directories.

2). Remove any “Right Click” Options

Aside from trying to keep people off your trail by switching domain names, you can also remove the ability to right-click any images or other elements of your landing pages with an easy-to-use script provided by one of the great people at Dynamic Drive. Simply place

<script language=JavaScript><!–
//For full source code, visit http://www.dynamicdrive.com
var message=””;
///
function clickIE() {if (document.all) {(message);return false;}}
function clickNS(e) {if
(document.layers||(document.getElementById&&!document.all)) {
if (e.which==2||e.which==3) {(message);return false;}}}
if (document.layers)
{document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN);document.onmousedown=clickNS;}
else{document.onmouseup=clickNS;document.oncontextmenu=clickIE;}
document.oncontextmenu=new Function(“return false”)
// –></script>

to the header of your lander and suddenly your images cannot be simply copied or saved from a browser. This will stop a lot of novice individuals from outright scraping your images. Obviously, print screen is always available.

3). Remove Unwanted Visitors

You can ensure that only the people who’re designated to see your landers see them using a couple of methods. One method you can use to keep things like spy tools from seeing your landing pages is with .htaccess and adding unwanted or flagged IP’s from viewing your landing page.

Doing this requires a little bit of digging on your part, but it doesn’t take much. For Cpanel, just find out which IP’s appear multiple times with no profitable action and block that IP from your server through the IP deny manager under the security section.

Another way to keep out unfruitful visitors is by redirecting bots like bo.lt from viewing and ripping your landing page. This can be done with a redirect script like so:

<?php
$ua = $_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
$ua_block =‘bo.lt|whatever site you don’t want|whatever IP you don’t want’; //add footprints to block, separated by | (pipe) symbol

if ( preg_match(“($ua_block)i”, $ua, $matches) ) {
//match detected, send off to somewhere else
header(‘Location: http://yourdomain.com/redirectedindex.html’);
die();
}
?>

4). Encrypt Your Code

A big reason for why people rip/scrape landing pages is not only because they can’t come up with any fresh ideas themselves, but because they’re not familiar with code. I can sympathize with the latter, being not an incredible expert in web pages myself, but once I’ve taken the time to create something really awesome, I would like some time to reap the benefits of my labor before someone instantly copies and pastes my hard work.

So to jumble up some work for the not-so-advanced scraper, you can use this nice HTML Encrypter and paste in your lander to create a coding mess so annoying, most people will not take the time to figure out what’s going on!

These are some of the tools and methods you can use to keep your landers out of the hands of the masses for a little bit longer. I should stress that taking these precautionary measures won’t completely ensure that your landers won’t get scraped eventually.

There are other ways you can keep your landers close, but at a certain point, you need to ask yourself when it’s no longer cost-effective to take every measure to secure a landing page. This marketing space is ever changing; which means that you have to change your methods and approach ever as much.

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    3 Comments

  • Add watermark to images in your landing page, so even other scrapers copy the images, they cannot use it. OK, this is not a good idea, forget it.

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