No Referrer given for a web site?

Has anyone seen this?

[dataguy]

I have a few web sites that I operate on a dedicated Win2k server, running IIS 5.0.

Recently I started running some ads for an advertiser that didn't want any tracking URL's. He said he didn't want anything to get in the way of a crawler finding his links. He said he'd just use his server logs to determine how many visitors he received from his ads on my sites.

I just receieved an email from him saying that none of the clicks are showing up in his server logs with my sites as the referrer. He's running Apache on Linux (if that makes any difference).

Anyone ever heard of this? Is there a way that ISS can be misconfigured to not show up as a referrer?

Thanks for your help!

[jdMorgan]

When you look at your own raw logs, do referrals from your own pages show up? For example, when one of your pages loads an image, do you see that page's URL as the referer for the image?

Since you have several sites, you could easily set up some test pages linked from the 'problem' site to the others, and then click the links and examine the logs on your other sites for referrals from the first.

The way you've described this makes me slightly suspicious of your advertiser -- it's pretty easy to use a tracking URL and then permanently redirect it to the 'plain' URL once the request hits the advertiser's server. Search engines would then index the advertisement under the non-tracking URL. You may need to implement an 'exit click script' on your site to make sure that the clicks you send to him are paid for...

Jim

[john_k]

The referrer information is optionally sent by the visitor's browser. Your IIS configuration has absolutely no bearing on the matter.

If you look at your own log files, you will notice that there are a lot of entries with no referrer. If you have been doing this for awhile, you will also realize that there are a lot more entries without referrers than there were 1, 2, or 4 years ago. That's because privacy control software can be set to block the referrer from being sent by the browser. This is something configured by the individual user, and again, there is nothing that you or your advertiser can do (programatically) to make the browser send the referrer information.

If you trust the advertiser, then appending a harmless querystring (somthing.html?siteid=100) onto the URL should help them to identify the hits coming from your site.

[Easy_Coder]

I run into the same thing with my paid ads that john_k is referring to regarding sofware that allows a client to prevent a web application from obtaining referral information from the http header collection.

What I do to at least get some idea of what's going on is route my paid ads to a page specific to that ad and I record whatever I can get into a database and set a session variable, and then again some clients can block the cookie that the Session attempts to set. So it's not an exact science but it helps.

Update...
Are you running server side vbscript or serverside jscript in regards to your asp?

[Easy_Coder]

Oops... ignore my last comment regarding "update"... I have no idea why I posted that in this thread. Thought I was replying to another thread.

[dataguy]

Ok, thanks for the reassurance. I have appended querystring values onto the links, hopefully that will do the trick for him.

A few months ago I removed the "X-Powered-By ASP.NET" from the customer headers in IIS. I guess I was worried that I disabled something else in the headers that could cause there to be no referrer in his logs.

The guy is adamant that I don't do anything else to the links. He wants to be sure that I pass PR to him I guess. He is paying a flat-rate for the links, so I guess it shouldn't matter to me how many people click on the links to his site. I just want to be sure he sees the value in the advertising that he purchased.

Thanks again!