Blank Referrer Showing

Executer · Jan 8, 2011

I'm curious...

My statistics is showing that all my traffic is showing up as a blank referrer. Im currently using the .htaccess 301 / redirect method.

Question tho, even tho its not "saying" exactly where my visitors are coming from, will this flag my account and my AM will notice something is up ?

195471 · Jan 8, 2011

Executer said:
Question tho, even tho its not "saying" exactly where my visitors are coming from, will this flag my account and my AM will notice something is up ?

It might. A lot of networks don't like blank referrers, and your account may come under more scrutiny if you have them. What I do is route all my traffic through a tracking domain (under my control) that redirects the user to the offer via automatic form submission using javascript. This ensures that the referrer is not blank, and it also hides your real source of traffic. It's also much safer than doing a double meta refresh, which has been known to leak the referrer.

I've explained how to do it in this thread:

Code:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/html-javascript/124257-js-redirect-keep-spoof-referrer.html

Executer · Jan 8, 2011

so this code will display the correct referrer (fake) ?

Code:

<form id="form1" method="post" action="destination/affiliate URL here">
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        document.getElementById('form1').submit();
</script>
</form>

WnrWnrChickenDinner · Jan 8, 2011

Make your life Simple: You can Shorten - Hide - Fake

http://referer.us/

PS: Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this

Executer · Jan 8, 2011

WnrWnrChickenDinner said:
Make your life Simple: You can Shorten - Hide - Fake

PS: Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this

thanks, but the first code made it work for me. Now it displays what i want it to.

Another question, is it against the tos to clone/copy the landing/offer/signup page you're affiliated with? i mean your still promoting their content. (adult)

I came up with this idea just in case my AM wants to desemble the redirecting script using NoScript, and if he/she does in anyway my website will still look very legit because the same content will be there.

195471 · Jan 9, 2011

Executer said:
so this code will display the correct referrer (fake) ?

Yes, but it needs to go on a .html page on a domain that's different from the domain where your promotional content is. If you put it on the same domain, that defeats the purpose of disguising the true referrer.

Executer said:
Another question, is it against the tos to clone/copy the landing/offer/signup page you're affiliated with? i mean your still promoting their content. (adult)

A lot of companies don't want you to clone, iframe, or even closely model their content (e.g., using similar designs, color schemes, text, etc.). You'd have to read the TOS of the company to see what they allow/disallow.

Executer said:
I came up with this idea just in case my AM wants to desemble the redirecting script using NoScript, and if he/she does in anyway my website will still look very legit because the same content will be there.

If you try to view that .html page with the javascript code using NoScript, you won't see anything because there's no content on it. Are you saying that you want to put your content inside <noscript> tags on that page in case someone has disabled javascript in the browser? I suppose you could do this, but I wouldn't put your "real" (high-converting) content there, lest they steal your ideas for promoting the offer. (Theft could still happen no matter what you do, but if your concern is that the AM is going to check out your referring URL, you could put "decoy" content there, such as an ezinearticle with a banner for the offer or something.)

Executer · Jan 9, 2011

195471 said:
If you try to view that .html page with the javascript code using NoScript, you won't see anything because there's no content on it. Are you saying that you want to put your content inside <noscript> tags on that page in case someone has disabled javascript in the browser? I suppose you could do this, but I wouldn't put your "real" (high-converting) content there, lest they steal your ideas for promoting the offer. (Theft could still happen no matter what you do, but if your concern is that the AM is going to check out your referring URL, you could put "decoy" content there, such as an ezinearticle with a banner for the offer or something.)

well im going to have to fully read it again, last time i read it, it didn't say anything about copying the same content (landing page) were not allowed.

On another note, i wasn't referring to putting my code inside the noscript tags but what i was trying to say was, if they decided to disable their javasscript with the "noscript plugin" and want to view my actually landing page before it redirects, i would be already safe (if cloning was allowed), because my actually landing page looks exactly the same as the affiliate (signup) landing page.

Two main reasons why i did this was because for:

1.I wanted to hide my traffic.
2.If the AM/anybody has a slow connection while re-viewing my website, you can see my actual content (before i cloned it) and clearly see the page being redirected. (and this doesn't look legit enough)

But by cloning it, you can't see the difference whats so ever while the page is ebing redirected, even the title is the same as the affiliate landing page, so the only thing u see that changes is the url from http://www.mysite.com > http://www.affilatelink.com.

Hopefully if this is allowed, then im all in the money... I can delivery any type of traffic i want.

I just want to be safe, just incase my AM does, view my website, if he hasn't already. I mean I been with them since 2007. This year im banking a lot more so i want to be ready for any curve balls thrown my way.

Thanks for the help... the code works flawless it displays my site as http://www.mysite.com. I also wanted to say, if the referral displays ur site followed by an ".html" file it doesn't look good at all - my 2 cents

195471 · Jan 9, 2011

Executer said:
I also wanted to say, if the referral displays ur site followed by an ".html" file it doesn't look good at all - my 2 cents

I see what you're saying, and I don't disagree with it. What I do is give the domain a name that has something to do with tracking, and then I give the .html files names that are relevant to the offers that I'm promoting. For example, hxxp://www.clicktrackingsite.com/offer-name.html. Doing that makes it pretty obvious that the referrer is simply a tracking domain, which no one can fault you for because the networks use them all the time to track YOUR clicks. If anyone were to question (no one has thus far) my URLs, I would just tell them that I send my traffic through my own tracking system first so that I can keep tabs on what traffic sources are producing, and which ones aren't. For me, this is easier than maintaining spreadsheets listing a bunch of subids and what subids go with what traffic sources. (I realize that the subid can be the name of the traffic source itself or the keywords, but for obvious reasons, subids should be nondescript.)

Of course, you don't have to do it the way that I described. You can use a niche-oriented domain name for each offer that you promote and have only one domain per offer (so the homepage, not some .html page, redirects to the offer). I do it the way that I do it because it's more cost effective.

Anyway, I'm glad you've got things sorted out, and good luck with your projects.

195471 · Jan 9, 2011

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