[Solved] Protect your PDF files

I have built a client/user front-end login.
This works fine, on the page I want to add some links to PDF files.
These PDF files needs to be protected. Google should not index them!
I think google will index them, so I searched the web.

I found 3 ways to protect the PDF files from indexing by google/others.


1) .htaccess


2) Use robots.txt to block the files from search engines crawlers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /assets/files/ # Block the directory.
Disallow: *.pdf # Block pdf files. Non-standard but works for major search engines.

3) Use rel="nofollow" on links to those PDFs
<a href="file.pdf" rel="nofollow">Download PDF</a>


Is 3) possible with TinyMCE, I don't see the rel on advanced? Or maybe add it with javascript, if so, how?
The script needs to change every <a href into <a rel="nofollow" href (in a div with class="protected") and does that actually work?



Oops, this post is placed in Development, if anyone can move it to general? [ed. note: fourroses666 last edited this post 11 years ago.]

I made a script that will do this for you, check out the jsfiddle here

Good luck.

Thanks again Ben, thats perfect!

When the <a> is into a <p> tag it doesn't work

http://jsfiddle.net/fourroses666/k6qrK/1/

I modified the code now it will work as long as any link is inside the protected div.

http://jsfiddle.net/k6qrK/3

Hope that helps.

You nailed it!