Hiding referer

Linking to affiliate offer, want to hide referer value from target site

[fitzer]

I am looking into promoting a product on a number of my sites using an affiliate link.

However, I do not want the product site to know which sites my traffic is coming from.

Is there a simple way to prevent the REFERER value from being passed to the site that I am linking to?

I've tried setting the referer header to blank or another value such as http://www.example.com with no luck.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[gergoe]

The referrer header is the part of the http request, and as such, it is sent by the browser, you can not directly modify that.

You should look into client side programming, because in some cases (when the request is initiated by some javascript code), the referrer header is not sent. But I repeat again, this is done by the browser, and there's no direct way you can alter this, even if you find a way to achieve this in a test environment, other browser (or browser versions) may behave differently.

[fitzer]

Thanks gergoe.

My solution - link my sites to an unrelated, third site that loads a banner and does a javascript redirect to the affiliate URL when the page loads (sure, this will be blocked in some cases, but for the most part it will not - regardless, the user can always click the link/banner to continue).

This will show my unrelated, third site as the referrer and source of my traffic to the affiliate product website.

If anyone can think of a better solution, please share it here.

Thanks!

[justgowithit]

However, I do not want the product site to know which sites my traffic is coming from.

Why not?

[fitzer]

Why not?

Because I don't trust affiliate companies - that type of information could be shared with my competitors (who are sometimes internal to the affiliate companies).

[phparion]

I totally agree with fitzer. I have been through such an event where my affiliate stole my traffic generating site idea and came into my competition.

[jatar_k]

you've got a good solution fitzer

then you can swap the "filtering" domain if needed or use a couple domains to sort traffic

[fitzer]

This will show my unrelated, third site as the referrer and source of my traffic to the affiliate product website.

I've also implemented a slightly different solution for another project that I wanted to send a blank referrer with. Instead of showing a banner and doing a JavaScript redirect, I just show a blank page with a META REFRESH redirecting to the target, affiliate product site.

From my testing, using the META REFRESH method completely hides the referrer (sends a blank referrer). This has been tested on Win XP in IE 6, 7, FF, Opera, and Safari. I'm not 100% on how reliable it is otherwise. Can anyone else confirm that this works?

[alex95_bg]

Neat :) I suppose the META tags are supported by any browser.I made a simple page implementing that and tested it on my Apache server and it works great.