A couple of doubts regarding detection of traffic source by the networks

LadRak · Aug 8, 2009

Hey all, I have a couple of doubts, tried to search, found double meta refresh but still not sure if I really need this.

So, here's the deal:

-Imagine you have a website with a button/banner with your affiliate link. Can the network see where the user comes from before arriving your site?
-If I put, for example, hxxp://www.domain.com/cars redirecting directly to an offer, is the affiliate "cookie" created? Is the answer to the question above, in this case, the same?

I'm not really doing anything extremelly blackhat per se, but if the networks know where the traffic that arrives to my landing page is from, that could get me in some pickles.

I really hope to get clear and definitive answers to this questions, as it is the only thing keeping me back from promoting some offers.

Thanks in advance,
LadRak

LadRak · Aug 9, 2009

Anyone?

195471 · Aug 9, 2009

LadRak said:
Imagine you have a website with a button/banner with your affiliate link. Can the network see where the user comes from before arriving your site?

No, they cannot see where your traffic is coming from BEFORE arriving at your site and clicking the button/banner.

LadRak said:
If I put, for example, hxxp://www.domain.com/cars redirecting directly to an offer, is the affiliate "cookie" created? Is the answer to the question above, in this case, the same?

If I understand you correctly, you have a link somewhere that points to hxxp://www.domain.com/cars, which then redirects to the offer. In that case, the network may be able to see where the traffic came from before it arrived at hxxp://www.domain.com/cars, depending on which type of redirect you're using. Both PHP redirects and meta refreshes will pass on the referrer. In other words, they will not show hxxp://www.domain.com/cars as the referrer -- they will show the page where you placed that link as the referrer. So if you have some web 2.0 property like a Squidoo lens that has a link to hxxp://www.domain.com/cars, the network will see the Squidoo lens as the referrer.

To avoid leaking the referrer, use javascript to post to the offer page. Using a DMR (double meta refresh) will just blank the referrer, which is not ideal because a lot of networks have a problem with blank referrers. IMHO, you want to show them a referrer that looks legit.

Here's an example of how it would work:

Let's say you have a Weebly page. On that page, put a link going to a page on another domain (one that you own) that will redirect to the offer. On this redirect page, insert the following code:

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="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server" method="post" action="PUT YOUR AFFILIATE LINK HERE">
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        document.getElementById('form1').submit();
    </script>
</form>
</body>
</html>

If, for example, your redirect page is found at hxxp://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.html, then the network will now see hxxp://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.html as the referrer, not the Weebly page from which the traffic really came. And in answer to the cookie question...yes, the cookie will be dropped once the person lands on the offer page, whether you're doing a redirect or not.

Hope that helps.

LadRak · Aug 9, 2009

Yes, 195471, that helps a lot.

I'll try to rep you once I drop my newbie status

, thanks a lot, you couldn't be clearer.

A couple of doubts regarding detection of traffic source by the networks

LadRak

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