301 redirect, hiding referrer

Can it be done?

[Damian]

I'm looking for a way to redirect traffic through a (perl) click tracker, but not pass the referrer info to the final destination. The reason is that my client does not want his clients to know the exact source of the traffic.
The back button should keep working though, to be able to use it in PPC campaigns.

Does anyone know a solution?

[larryn]

The referrer is kept by the browser, so unless you are going to use a proxy server I'm pretty sure there isnt a simple way to hide the referrer - what about if you used a third party redirection service or domain?

[Damian]

>use a proxy server
Thanks larryn, sounds like the idea I needed.

"third party redirection" is a relative term in my webmaster world :)

<added> .. And welcome to Webmasterworld! </added>

[Damian]

Our client found the solution, this is how we do it:

We direct traffic through our click tracker, log what we need to log and redirect with a 302 to the clicktracker of our client. They log what they need to log and print an html page with a javascript redirect. Key is to use self.location.replace(url) and not self.location.href = url to make sure the back button keeps working.

Voila.. The visitors go straight to the original page on which they clicked the link when they click the back-button of their browser, but the final destination site does not see any referrers in their logs.

Only works for NN3+ and IE4+ ..