Password protected folder?

[Trixtar]

Hi everyone.

Please forgive me if I am posting in the wrong directory, but I am a total newbie in this.

I am trying to set up a website with a password protected folder to hide certain content from search engines, and as far as I have understood, you need asp to do that. (or is there another way to create a password protected folder? or even hide the content from SE's?)

I did read some infos about it, but I am not familiar with the terms used in the articles. The articles also included stuff about .htaccess, which I have never heard of before, nor did I even understand what it is! The only thing I understood was that I have to create a file called .htaccess. For what and what next, I don't know.

My experience level is a minimum understanding of how to piece basic html together to something useful.

Any help or/and advice or/and tips will be highly appreciated.

Please ask if I have not included enough information to answer my questions.

Sincerely,
Louise

[ess]

Hello there,

No...you do not have to have asp, php, javascript, or what so ever to prevent search engines from access folders on your website.

you should a robots.txt file defined in your website...specifying which directories are allowed access and which should not be accessed.

You should google search robots.txt generators. There are a lot of generators that would help you on creating your robots.txt file.

If your website is hosted on Apache...you should also use .htaccess files. Again, search google for .htaccess howto and you will find loads of tutorials demonstrating how to write .htaccess files.

Good luck.
:thumbsup:

[degsy]

If you are on hosted webspace then check if you have a Control Panel for your domain. You may be able to setup Protected Folders from there.


If you have access to IIS then you can remove Read access to the folder.


The method using ASP would be to setup a function to include on your protected pages.
If you check for certain conditions or variables
e.g.
If you require a user to login then it would check to see if the user is logged in - a session/cookie variable is set.

Or it could be based on Browser or IP detection.


Here is an example of a basic login system
http://forums.aspfree.com/code-bank-54/basic-membership-login-system-125958.html

[Trixtar]

Thank you for your advice.

I'll definitely be looking into this asap.

The search engines should give me some time to fix this, right? It's an already uploaded site, but I am currently not working on driving traffic to it.