Forcing web traffic to come from one location

kbc1

Hi all

Any thoughts or suggestions on how to achieve the following would be greatly appreciated.

A customer has 2 existing websites. website1.com and website2.com

I have just created a new website for them. website3.com

The customer wants all traffic to website1.com and website2.com to be routed via website3.com

They are not concerned about losing their organic rankings for website1.com and website2.com

If a user visits website1.com or website2.com directly via the browser, it should redirect them to website3.com and then they can click a link which takes them to either website1.com or website2.com

In a nutshell, website3.com will now be the portal to the other two websites.

How on earth would you approach this?

Many Thanks for reading.
kbc

halojoy

To know from what website a user comes
we can use
echo $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

Using the HTTP_REFERER variable with PHP
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-http-referer-variable/

bpat1434

Although the referrer can be spoofed, so it's not 100% accurate.

Another option is to use an intermittent form. Instead of a link, you could submit a form with a public/private key encryption and decrypt it on the other end. Something as simple as encoding the time would work (since the time will always be variable, giving you greater variance in your posted hash).

Then in website 1 and 2, you can simple check to see if that person came from website 3 with that form. If not, send them to website 3, otherwise, send them on. You can keep state with sessions. That way, once on website 1, they won't have to go back to website 3 to move forward through website 1.