Triple Meta Refresh and Link Cloaking

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SpaceMonkey

SpaceMonkey

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Aug 18, 2007
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I want to be able to completely hide both my traffic and landing pages from an affiliate network. I was wondering if this setup would completely block out all referrers.

traffic source -> MyLandingPage.com -> MyLandingPage.com/go -> Meta Refresh -> domain1.com -> Meta Refresh -> domain2.com -> Meta Refresh -> Offer

I thought that two Meta Refreshes on different domains would be fine, but I just wanted to make sure. Also, does it matter how long we set the Meta Refresh timer for? I thought I heard that 0 could still pass on a referrer so I guess I'll make the last meta refresh 1 second.
 


That should really take care of it. A double will do though. Timer doesn't matter.
 
Won't that many refreshes significantly slow down your page loading time?
header() in PHP will clear away any referrers just as easily, although your network may start asking questions if all of your traffic comes through without a referrer.
 
Doing all that is overkill. Excessive redirecting and timers are likely going to increase your bounce rate. Make page in another folder or on another domain and use a META redirect or frame the offer, then just link to that page. It will either pass no referrer or the referrer will be the frame page, which doesn't tell the advertiser anything.
 
Fuck me, I'd close your site before the second redirect. If you had 1 slow down on any of the servers that would take forever to load the page.
 
it amazes me how few people actually know how to scrub referers.

machine control...header redirect to scrub referer? seriously dude how long have you been doing this stuff.

the only sure-fire way i've seen is to use javascript to submit an empty GET form to the dest url, and use a 2 second meta as a backup.

this is all fairly easy to test with php since your redirect can detect if there is still a referer. please remember that referer data is all handled by the browser so many solutions will work differently for each.
 
machinecontrol said:
although your network may start asking questions if all of your traffic comes through without a referrer.
Click to expand...

And if they do, tell them that it's none of their business. The only time a network should ask about traffic sources is if the advertiser complains. Even then I wouldn't reveal anything...I'd either change the traffic or move on.

Actually I think the cakes up there had an article along these lines on his blog.
 
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