Is it possible to prevent PDF documentation from being searchable in my x10 hosting acct?

[thevalis]

Hello all.

I understand this question may sound silly, but please understand I'm a site designer who does not have nearly the knowledge a lot of you folks do. Here's the situation. I administer a website for a client that provides hundreds of documents (pdf's) to people who request them on a password-protected website. It came to my attention that someone found a link to one of those confidential documents during a Google search. These documents are confidential because they contain proprietary data. My question is: Is there a way to upload these pdf's to an outside host (like my x10 account for example) so that they cannot be searchable? Easy solutions are preferred due to the time sensitivity of this matter, but I'd gladly listen to anyone with an answer regardless of the level of difficulty. Thanks in advance.

 

[lordmetro]

1. Amend your robots.txt to disallow all search engines from seeing a directory on that host.
2. Set .htaccess permissions on the folder - make it password protected or something!
3. The fact that they are searchable on Google shows you probably have no htaccess denying access from those files. I don't know what cms system you are using, but clearly, it htaccess isn't configured.
4. File hosting is not allowed on x10 as far as I am aware. They disallow hosting of "backups, personal files, or non-web accessible files. Any files hosted on the account must be directly related to the website the account is intended for. Files over 10MB in size will be automatically removed from non-upgraded accounts."

Sign up for the Google Webmasters Tools and remove that url from showing up on results.

Find an actual file hosting solution such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Mega.nz, Mediafire etc. they all give you free space to host.

Lastly, it is actually easy to index the sites Google has crawled, simply type in

filetype:pdf somedocumentiamlookingfor

and you might find more of it lol