Hot answers tagged referrer
5
One of your affiliates is likely paying for a Google AdWords campaign using their referral link to drive traffic to your site (and boost their sales). That's the simplest explanation, and therefore probably the most likely cause of the AdSense referrals you're seeing.
I've had affiliates take out ads to boost their sales before; a welcome side effect of ...
4
It turns out that all this traffic is not from referrer spam, it's from StumbleUpon's android app. All that traffic has Android user agents, and by logging the HTTP requests the android app is making I was able to determine that they are setting the referrer header incorrectly. They've got a typo in their own domain name!
4
I know that referrer field can be changed.. but why?
This is known as referrer spam - unfortunately, spammers caught on to the fact that some webmasters do not secure their automatically-generated stat reports and, as most report generators do not add nofollow to referrer links, it is possible to get a link from a number of domains simply by providing a ...
3
If you need the full referrer link in Google Analytics, you can add a custom filter to view the complete URL.
If the referrer link however needs authentication, you will need to register to access that page.
3
Backgrounds are meant to be backgrounds. They're not meant to support interaction.
Your options would seem to be:
1. Do it in HTML rather than CSS.
2. Have your server return different content according to the User-Agent string.
3. If your SVG is rectangular and opaque, you can do fallbacks as
background-image: url(fallback.png);
background-image: none, ...
3
You can create your own URL using the URL builder (or your own flavor of it if you want the whole thing to be automated) and then assign it to an affiliate ID and store it in a database. Then whenever that affiliate ID is used redirect to the URL with the Google Analytics code in it. That's how my clients are doing it. It works like a charm.
3
(direct) can be misleading. Traditionally, people think of it as meaning "people typed in my URL directly"; the reality is usually a mix of that and of traffic sent from places that don't pass an HTTP REFERER header (and don't have some sort of manual tagging using utm_* parameters).
Specifically:
Non-web sources like smartphone apps, mail clients, and ...
3
I would probably write the code myself to track them. Although perhaps it would be easier trying to hook it into analytics. I'm not sure how to do that.
To do the re-direct you would want to use .htaccess (providing you're using Apache server)
The .htacess file might look something like this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ...
3
referrer strings are handled at the browser.
Exactly. It is the users browser that sends the HTTP referer[sic] as part of the HTTP request. Website.com (where the link originates) has no control over this. In fact, the user has complete control over this.
The HTTP referer is notoriously unreliable. The user can configure their browser to not send a ...
3
Yes. In the example below, people reaching page B from a page other than A will receive a forbidden error. To do it, you need something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com/A.html$
RewriteRule B.html - [F,NC]
Substitute yoursite and the html extension as appropriate for your case.
Note that this is not a secure way of doing ...
2
Sadly you can not referrer on HTTPS to sites using HTTP. You can however do HTTPS to HTTPS or HTTP to HTTPS.
SOURCE
Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure)
HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure
protocol.
A work around would be to use a internal redirect script that rather than directing ...
2
Unless you have a reason to believe such requests are harming your site or affecting the experience of legitimate users, I suggest you avoid any broad rule to block visitors. They may occur for legitimate people which would be counter-productive.
Now, if something bad is happening, such as longer response time for visitors, excessive bandwidth usage, etc, ...
2
For search engines, putting the correct URL in a canonical link tag is the best idea. Then if search engines follow the link, they know the correct URL to show in search results.
Your concern may be with users copying the full URL and pasting elsewhere. A good solution here is to do a 301 redirect back to the canonical page. So when you load the home page, ...
2
Instead of overriding the referrer information, you should add the subdomain to the Referrer Ignore List that Google Analytics stores.
You can do this using the _addIgnoredRef() method in the GA API.
Google's description of the the method:
_addIgnoredRef()
Excludes a source as a referring site.
Use this option when you want to set
certain ...
2
Does anybody know if this is valid traffic from stumbleupon?
It isn't. The WHOIS information hides behind one of those privacy shields, and the home page is obviously designed to look like a parked domain.
This looks like a classic case of referrer spam, though usually they go through a bit more effort than this.
2
Perhaps the social site is using a redirect which strips the referrer? This is usually not the case for mainstream ones like Facebook though.
Certain privacy tools like ZoneAlarm are known to strip referrers too. These are not used that often either but is the only other possibility I can think of.
2
The “applewebdata” URI scheme is used by iOS and Mac OS X instead of the “http” in URIs used for accessing internal resources on the device or computer itself. The visitors likely came to your site whilst using their iOS or Mac OS X device, being refered there by documents stored on the device rather than from a web page.
2
It doesn't seem to be possible. And the problem is not on the link you describe but on the parameters that link ads to the final URL something like:
?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UsefulUsability+(Useful+Usability)&utm_content=Google+Reader
You can prevent future users to link to you using this Google Analytics ...
2
Well you can go here http://aaronlogan.com/downloads/htaccess.php and have a pretty big list of referrer spam blocks in your htaccess. Or you can use something like the following
# set the spam_ref variable - referrer site or a keyphrase
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://(www.)?some-spammer.com" spam_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer ...
1
If this is an example of referrer spam, then the way to stop it in the long term is to make sure that your log files are not indexed by search engines. That makes this a valueless exercise for the spammer and eventually they will cotton on to this and stop doing it.
1
Sadly the Google Analytics way didn't work for me(I might have messed up the code a bit, still, I tried a few things to fix it without solving the problem).
To solve my problem I build my own little tracker. Every referrer which is not already in the database will be saved. It's not perfect and I might have to improve a few things (doen't save referrers ...
1
The referrer is determined from the headers sent by the browser that visits your site. By convention, this should contain the URL that referred the visitor to your site - but it could be set to absolutely anything.
You may be able to gain more insight by seeing which browser tag accompanies this referrer.
1
Don't rely on the referrer. You can store the URL as a query string parameter, or as a session parameter.
User hits blog.php. This page checks for the age cookie.
If age cookie not present, store current URL as a query string parameter like this - /age_verify.php?returnURL=blog.php. Alternatively, store the url in a session parameter.
Redirect the user to ...
1
It looks like this subject was raised in the blogosphere around 5 years ago, but nothing appears to have come of it. It may well be worth exploring the idea again, but I have no idea if the sheer size of the problem would make it unmanageable.
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