Managing SEO client files is important for both security and privacy. For example, suppose you are in the process of doing an onsite SEO work report for a certain client, and in the report, you've included sample web pages where you can illustrate specific onsite SEO corrective action to your client.
Of course, the most convenient way to do this is to use your own web server space to host this mockup content for your SEO client. However, there are two important, typical problems that commonly crop up for companies hosting client mockup files.
First, the mockup content is publicly accessible. This means that even Google bots and unauthorized persons can access these files -- files that are supposed to be confidential.
Second, mockup pages that can be crawled and indexed by search engine bots introduce duplicate content issues with the client's official web content. You might see this problem occur at some web development companies, where the web developer failed to blocked search engine bots, thus inadvertently allowing a client's test website to be indexed.
As a result, after the complete deployment of the client's website on its own web server, the site is already duplicated, with the content appearing on the web developer's websites!
If you are a freelance SEO managing your own web server, then using Apache user authentication can be a great help in sorting out the two major issues explained above.
If Apache user authentication has been implemented on your client SEO folders(containing the necessary mockup files you need to show), then public users cannot access those files, because they are password protected. Search engine bots also will not index folders which are password protected, so you can ensure that the content will not be crawled and indexed.
You need to assign a unique username and password combination to each of your SEO clients. This way, when you provide them with an SEO report, you can include a username and password, which they can use it to access protected SEO mockup files.
So what would happen if an intruder attempted to access protected content using Apache user authentication? They would be denied access, and the server would return an "Error 401: Authorization Required" status.
Structuring Client SEO files in your Apache web server
It is important to be highly organized if you to plan to implement user authentication on your web server. It is highly recommended that you create a dedicated folder where you can place and store SEO client files.
This folder will be created at the root directory of your web server. Inside this folder is where you will create sub-folders for each of your clients. Then you can implement Apache user authentication techniques on each of these client folders so that they are password protected.
The file structure will look like this:
The above screen shot shows a web server with the following files (blue) in the root directory (index.php, robots.txt, about.php, etc).
You can see a folder named "seoclients," which is the dedicated folder that contains your client SEO files. Inside the seoclients folder are sub-folders for each of your clients. These green-colored folders will be protected with user authentication.
Here is what you need to do:
1. Create a folder named seoclients at the root directory of your website. Set the file permission to 755 (recurse into sub-directories) using your FTP client (Filezilla for example).
2. Create at least one sub-folder under it named myclient; set the file permission on this folder to 755 as well (also recurse into sub-directories).
3.) Open a text editor and type the following test content:
<html> <head> <title>Restricted Page on Myclient folder</title> </head> <body> <p>This is a restricted page. If you have seen this; then you have successfully authenticated using a username and password.</p> </body> </html>
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