Setting False Referer

4specs · 2004-01-11T16:13:00+00:00

I have the following objective: I run a website supported by advertising from companies whose links may appear on many pages - say 5-15 pages. Many of thes...

Setting False Referer

4specs

I have the following objective:

I run a website supported by advertising from companies whose links may appear on many pages - say 5-15 pages.
Many of these companies are not web-savvy and some have website reporting on referrers only by page and not total referrals by website. In these cases our website ranks low as a referrer as they are not seeing all the referrals, just the ones that make the cut off on their reporting.
I use a php script to make the referral and log the referral. The script is called by goto.php?http://www.url.com/ and does a Location:$Query redirection.
I want the referer value recorded by their server or tacking program to be a constant, not a variable depending on the actual sending page. How can I set the referer to a value I want to and not the actual referring page? If this cannot be done in PHP, I could change this to Perl or another language if required to set the desired referrer as the script is very simple.

My competitors force the user to go to a separate page for each company which consolidates all of the referrals for a company to one page. I do not want to do that as I want to keep the number of clicks down for my users.

I looked at using CURL, but the images break when I pull the page in and resend them. When I use CURL to pull the page into a php/html page, I get double <html> header and footer lines.

I tried setting a referer header in the php script and it does appear in the headers when checked by a header checker but is not logged by Apache as a referrer in the logs for the target page.

Any suggestions of a good starting place to make this happen or for a new research direction would be appreciated.

Colin

swr

The referrer is provided by the browser, not the web server. So you can't directly control it from PHP. Your PHP sending a "Referrer" header to the browser is meaningless; the browser will go on to send whatever referrer it wants to the other site when it connects to it.

You already have a goto.php page... Odd that the referrer isn't showing that page. Or is it? If the referrer is showing the old URL instead of the goto.php URL, then try using some other mechanism for redirecting, it might show goto.php instead. If the referrer is showing the goto.php page, maybe the target URL in the query string is causing it to be counted as a seperate page? If so, you might want to use some other mechanism to pass the URL to goto.php, like a cookie.

There may not be a solution though, which is probably why your competitors are doing it the way they are.

4specs

The originating page is being shown as a referer.

I have tried several ways to get the script to show as the referer such as opening a new page with a javascript redirect or html refresh, but none of those solutions log a referer in the logs.

Thanks for the input. I thought I would ask and probably decide not to worry about this and teach potential advertisers about proper reporting of web statistics.