Blog : How To Protect The Confidential Information Of Your Online Store

In previous articles, we have talked about the importance of our online store appearing easily in the main search engines of the Network. However, selling online means dealing with information that, in many cases, is confidential and, therefore, should not fall into strange hands. Despite what it may seem, protecting this type of information is very simple, just use a few simple files whose operation we explain below.

The most extensive protection system. There is a common formula to prevent search engines like Google or Yahoo from showing certain sections of our online store that we want to keep private, as well as all the data related to our commercial transaction system. This formula consists of including a specially formatted file, called robots.txt, in the root directory of the files of our online store.

How to create robots.txt files: As its name suggests, this tool is a text file that anyone can create using simple editors like Notepad or Wordpad. On the contrary, it is not advisable to resort to other more complex editing programs, such as Microsoft Word, since they could corrupt the file. The steps to follow when creating these files in Google, the most widely used Internet search engine, are the following:

Access Google's Webmaster Tools through your Google account. In the left column, click on Tools and then click on Generate robots.txt. Select the default access for robots. Specify any other additional rules.

Save your robots.txt file by downloading or copying the content to a text file and saving it as robots.txt. Save the file in the top-level directory of your site. The robots.txt file must be located at the root of the domain. If it is located in subdirectories, it will not be valid, since the robots only look for it in the root of the domain.

There is another, much simpler, alternative option to avoid indexing specific pages. It consists of embedding this line between the META tags of your web page: META NAME ROBOTS CONTENT NOINDEX.

However, it should be borne in mind that there are fewer search engines that recognize and respect this method than that of robots.txt, so it is recommended that we use the latter to protect the most confidential data of our online store.