How to prevent information from being passed..

[qwik]

I have some affliate links on my site and I'm wondering how much information can be passed on from my site to the other company. Is keyword data from the search engines something that could be passed on? If so, how could I prevent this? Does having the link open a new window help?

-qwik

[qwik]

I suppose what I am asking is if a user finds my site by typing in "Purple Widgets" in google and then clicks on an affliliate link that opens a new browser, is the keyword information passed along to the new browser..

Anyone with any insight or ideas, I would really appreciate your comments.. Thanks,

-qwik

[physics]

If you're just sending the user to the merchant using a standard link then no they won't know what search engine the visitor used to find your site or what specific key phrase. That is unless that information is in your url for some reason.
For example, in your access logs you'll see the referrer is a google url with purple+widgets in it. When someone clicks from your page to the merchant page then the merchant will see the referer as your url (i.e. http://www.example.com/yourpage.html) ... they won't see the google referring url. However if you do some tricky stuff and dynamically put the key phrase from google into your url (for example to hilight the phrases that were searched in google) ... then yes they would see that in their logs. So really it depends on your site but normally the answer is no, they won't know how the user got to your page or the keywords.
By the way, opening the page in a new window won't make any difference but is something you may want to do anyway depending on the nature of your site.

[qwik]

Thank you very much for the information. I dont change the url at all, so I should be safe then.

Thanks again for clearing that up for me.

-qwik