Redirect Question

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vivianrollins

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Forgive the newbie question but here goes and I hope someone can clarify this for me:

On my LP, all my links are as such: www.mysite.com/aff1.php, www.mysite.com/aff2.php, etc.

In the aff1.php, this is the code I use: <?php header( 'Location: http://affiliatelink' ) ;?>

I want to drive junk traffic to offers page and want the networks to see the referral as www.mysite.com. When I tested this redirect method with Google analytics, the referral domain of www.mysite.com didn't show up. I basically replaced the affiliatelink with a site of mine which has analytics setup. The stats on that site did not show www.mysite.com as a referral.

So the question is what is the right code to use. Anyone?

Thanks
 
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This code will show the site with the link to www.mysite.com/aff1.php as the referrer .. A header redirect like this happens at the server end and hence the referer doesn't change ..

What site are you putting this on ?
 
So far I think GA is showing it a direct and no referral is given.
 
This is confusing me. Since GA see it as a direct, would that mean that the affiliate network can see where the traffic came from?

Is a html refresh code safe to use? In his situation? (I'm sending junk traffic to my links like vivianrollins is)

I really know very very little about this stuff.
 
Last edited:
Thanks Genjutsu. I never thought that my AV or Firewall would block referral info. The strange part is I used a different code and the referral domain (mysite.com) did show up in GA. The code I use is:
<html>
<frameset rows="*" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0" onLoad="top.location.href='http://mysite.com'">
<frame src="http://affiliatelink" name="mainFrame" id="mainFrame" />
</frameset>
</html>

but the file is now a aff.htm file. so all links are www.mysite.com/aff.htm

This showed mysite.com up in GA as referral domain. the only issue with this htm file is that right after it hits my affiliate site, it comes back to mysite.com. My goal is to use one redirect for both my LP and for sending in junk traffic. This code works for sending in junk traffic but if I use this on my LP, all my visitors will bounce right back to mysite.com.

This of course is not idea.

Also, what is a meta-refresh and is that important for the PHP redirect? I found a document which has this code as php Redirect:
<?
header("Location: http://youraffiliatelink.com");
exit;
?>
What is the 'exit' for?

Yet another code I haven't tested is a html redirect:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com">
</head>
</html>

I will try this and report results once I get to it.

Thank you much.
 
So here's an update from my testing:
<html>
<frameset rows="*" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0" onLoad="top.location.href='http://mysite.com'">
<frame src="http://affiliatelink" name="mainFrame" id="mainFrame" />
</frameset>
</html>

This code will show the referral as www.mysite.com/aff.htm and NOT the link listed in the code which is www.mysite.com

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com">
</head>
</html>
This code doesn't do anything, not sure where the error is. It doesn't redirect and results in a blank page.

<?php header( 'Location: http://affiliatelink' ) ;?>
This code redirects BUT it doesnt NOT show up in stats so no credit is given to mysite.com. The site also showed a visitor has arrived but again, no domain referral credit was given. This is a big issue but as pointed out by Genjutsu, ny AV or FW might be causing this.

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://affiliatelink" />
<title>Page has moved</title>
</head>
<body>
whatever you want to write
</body>
</html>
This code redirects to but again, no domain referral credit was given only shows a visitor in activity stats.

Please note that I've setup eWEbcounter as my new stats tracking app because it has real time reporting.

Does anyone have the code to use? I hate to assume its my AV or FW and I can't test this because I do not want to turn them off. Also, the htm file did showed the proper domain referral credit so how could this really just be AV or FW?

Any clues?
 
yes I was told by Ruck once upon a time to use the meta-refresh code. Never had a problem since.
 
I was always told that using the meta refresh as your redirect would show that page as the referrer. However, I was just doing some testing with a meta refresh, CPA offer and Yahoo answers and it still shows Yahoo Answers when viewing the info through Live HTTP headers.

Code: 
http://www.mysite.com/cpaoffer/

GET /cpaoffer/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mysite.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index

So unless I'm wrong, the meta refresh is still passing along Yahoo Answers data.

Here's the meta refresh code I'm using on the above redirect page h**p://www.mysite.com/cpaoffer/

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns=" http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;URL=CPAOFFER">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
 
Thanks Genjutsu. I had considered using a double refresh after looking at these results, and your input confirmed what was thinking.
 
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;url=http://youraffiliatelink.com">
</head>
</html>
This code doesn't do anything, not sure where the error is. It doesn't redirect and results in a blank page.
Click to expand...

I was using this code and have the same problem. I discovered that it works in firefox, but not internet explorer.
 
You guys need to be really careful when handling cheap traffic, (as the networks hate it) which sometimes still pass the referer after any kind of redirection (JS, Meta, and PHP Header Refresh or location). Im at the moment testing something out that should take care of this. You could get a blank referer with a double redirect, but its too much hassle and depending where you get your cheap traffic from, you will never see a hit after a double redirect if you are using cheap traffic to smooth out conversion rates. Also, a blank referer may cause questioning from the affiliate manager, and you should be a smooth talker if any of them get to call ya on it :)
 
My idea was to have my domain shown as a referral so from the network's perspective, all traffic is coming from one LP which will make it more legit. If I blank out the referral, then wouldn't the network get suspicious?

Thanks to everyone's input, I now realized that the code which I've been using will BLANK out the referral domain. Of course my goal was to SHOW my domain as the referral.

The only code which show my domain as a referral is this:
<html>
<frameset rows="*" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0" onLoad="top.location.href='www.mysite.com'">
<frame src="affiliate link" name="mainFrame" id="mainFrame" />
</frameset>
</html>

The only issue with this code is that after the visitor hits the affiliate site, it redirects the visitor right back to mysite.com. Any programmers out there that know how to manipulate this code to make it so the visitor will stay once at the affiliate site?

As of now, almost 90% of the junk traffic is NOT getting credited according to GA. The networks are showing hits but now I wonder what they see.
 
vivianrollins, what do you mean that 90% of the junk traffic isn't getting credited? Are you saying that 90% of the time it doesn't show the referrer?
 
Last edited:
meaning that I used buyhitscheap to send traffic to www.mysite.com/aff.php and non of that traffic sent are showing up as hits from GA. from buyhitscheap, it showed as hits sent but from GA, it shows no hits. i know there's a delay but i've waited over 24 hours and tested in multiple days.
 
vivianrollins said:
meaning that I used buyhitscheap to send traffic to www.mysite.com/aff.php and non of that traffic sent are showing up as hits from GA. from buyhitscheap, it showed as hits sent but from GA, it shows no hits. i know there's a delay but i've waited over 24 hours and tested in multiple days.
Click to expand...

Does it show up in your affiliate's stats?

With my other html refresh code that I was having problems with, I only had 5-20% of my buyhitscheap traffic show up. I thought it was because the redirect code turned out not to work in IE (at least most of the time), but I don't know. I'm now changing the code to the one you just posted.

Maybe buyhitscheap is screwing us
 
Sometimes, BuyHitsCheap traffic wont register exactly the same, but from what I can see, if you are using a redirect and your server is slow, this may be whats causing it not to show at all (Im very suspicious about buyhitscheap, double redirects will never count if you do them)
 
I've changed the code to vivianrollins last code he posted, and the buyhitscheap traffic seems to be showing up with my affiliate network now.
 
So how are things going now, vivianrollins? I've been caught up in other things, but am now just gonna get started using your last code that you listed.
 
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