Legacy REQUEST: If anti-hotlinking enabled forward to download page instead of giving 403 er

[bzcomputers]

Currently I have anti-hotlinking enabled so direct links to download files do not currently work from outside my domain.

The issue is that Google receives 403 forbidden errors for all these direct download links it comes across on the internet. It may be better that instead of giving a 403 error that the users and Google just be redirected to the main download page where they can then click on the link themselves.

Including all the direct download file links in the sitemap with canonical urls pointing to their main download page may also help.

Just a couple ideas off the top of my head, there may be better solutions, but what it is doing currently is hurting SEO with the anti-hotlinking turned on (which I'd like to keep on).

 

[Fillip H.]

We'll take it into consideration for future versions

 

[bzcomputers]

Could you point me to the code, I think in the mean time I'd like to just add an exception if "www.google.com" and maybe another search engine or two are the referers.

 

[Fillip H.]

I've made two changes to /dbtech/downloads/actions/file.php, first to implement this suggestion and second to (temporarily) allow domains in the "Redirect Whitelist" vBOption to bypass this filter.

I'll add a dedicated vBOption for this in vBDownloads in the future, but for now this should do you

 

[Fillip H.]

Hello bzcomputers,

This ticket has now been closed with the status Implemented.

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