Forcing a referal as coming from index

[MHes]

Hi
I have a directory site covering many topics around an overall theme. Therefore a site may be listed on 3 or 4 different pages.

I want a site owner to clearly see me as a referer, but when the traffic comes from 3 different sub urls it is lost, having been split and thus appearing 3 times low down in their stats.

This causes problems in them seeing my traffic coming in or being noticed in the first place.

Can I force the referring url to allways be the top level domain, even if the link clicked is on a sub page?..... and how do I do it!

[mack]

I rough and ready way of doing this would be to build a page that automaticaly redirects to the site in question and have all your internal links, link to the redirecting page, That way the user will see all your hits coming from the one page and it will be more visable.

[Lisa]

You can not do that redirect page with a http header redirection. You must use javascript. I would also have a backup link for them to click if javascript is not working...

But a good site that is counting referrers should be able to tie all your referrals togethor as one.

[bird]

First, the sites you link to won't be happy about such a move. If I am listed several times in a directory, then I want to see which clicks comes from which listing. You may get noticed earlier in some cases, but then the webmaster will go to your homepage, not find his link there as advertised from the referrer, and probably leave again thinking that you just spammed his logs. I would highly recommend against this approach.

Having said that, doing this with a server side redirect is no problem. Your redirect-script will have to send the following headers:

Content-Type: text/html
Status: 301 Redirected
Location: http://www.target_site.com/
Referer: http://www.yoursite.com/

[MHes]

Many thanks to you all, very usefull. I take the point about wanting to see the link page on the stats so I will live with this problem!