html - How to prevent deep linking to files on my website

Question

I own a website which contain a lot of freeware stuff to download on it. The problem I'm facing is that people from around the world are taking the direct links of the files (for example .zip files) and posting them on their websites and general forums. I am getting a huge amount of bandwidth and that's ok, but the number of pages visited is low. Is there a way or a script that I can add to the links, so that when someone presses on the link from a foreign website, a page from my website opens instead, which then lets him download the file so I can get more visits.

For example, this is a address from my website:

http://sy-stu.org/stu/PublicFiles/StdLibrary/Exam.zip

When anyone presses on it, it will start the downloading process directly.

Answer 1

Your site is hosted by an Apache web server, so you should be able to do the following in your site's httpd.conf (or virtual host block)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yourdomain.com/  [NC]
RewriteRule   ^/PublicFiles/  /page-about-direct-links.html

That is basically saying:

1. Turn the mod_rewrite engine on
2. If the HTTP Referrer is not blank…
3. And doesn't contain my domain name (with or without “www.”)…
4. Redirect any requests for anything under /PublicFiles/ to /page-about-direct-links.html

More information on mod_rewrite can be found here: mod_rewrite - Apache HTTP Server