protecting some PDFs

[rondog]

I have a directory with some PDFs. Once a user logs in they have access to these links. My problem is google has indexed these PDFs and I know robots.txt will help with that, but what about other search engines? Can I use PHP to restrict access to the PDFs unless a user is logged in?

[discomatt]

Store them outside of webroot, and serve them to the user with PHP

[rondog]

They are outside of the webroot..the site is like so:

 

www.site.com/client/index.php

 

the pdfs:

www.site.com/client/docs/some_pdf_file.pdf

 

yet google still finds them.

[akitchin]

by outside of the webroot, he means ABOVE the webroot.  that is, if your webroot location is:

 

/usrs/username/local/public_html/

 

then you'll want to toss them in:

 

/usrs/username/local/

[DarkWater]

That's not out of the webroot, rondog. =/

 

--Aww, akitchin beat me to it. D:

[rondog]

ohh ok gotcha so for a link I would just do ../../ etc?

[DarkWater]

ohh ok gotcha so for a link I would just do ../../ etc?

 

No, you'd need a PHP file to serve the PDFs because they won't be accessible at all from the browser.

[rondog]

ok I am doing:

<?php
$file = "../../pdfs/policy.pdf";
header("Content-type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=\"policy.pdf\""); 
readfile($file);
?>

 

and its force downloading the pdf..I want it to just open in the browser..any idea?