Comments on: How do I block my url from showing up in other people's referral logs?

Question: How do I block my url from showing up in other people's referral logs?

RoseovSharon — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:34:13 -0800

How do I block my url from showing up in other people's referral logs? I am not doing anything shady here... it's just that I've put up a blog that I mainly want to share with friends and family. I don't want to go to the trouble of password protecting it, and I know that anything on the web can be seen by most anybody... but I would like to simply discourge visits from those who have no reason to be there. I've already set up robot.txt(s) to keep the search engines out, but I want to deter people from visiting the site just because my link shows up on their logs due to an occasional link I might post. I know there is a way to block the referring link address (as frequently other sites get blocked in my own logs), I just don't know how to do it. Anyone have a simple solution?

By: joshwa

joshwa — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:50:45 -0800

you want a server-based redirect script. It'll take the url as a parameter, spoof the referrer, and redirect the browser, e.g. something along these lines of PHP:

$URI=$_GET['URI'];
header("Referer: http://www.example.com");
eader("Location: $URI");
exit;

then you write your links as yourserver.com/redirect.php?URI=http://linkedpage.com/

this should show up in their logs as traffic coming frmo example.com.

google for "redirect script" and you should find plenty.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:52:52 -0800

Or you can just use Google's redirect:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=URL

By: cactus

cactus — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:06:29 -0800

joshwa and smackfu's comments answer your first question, but it sounds like what you're really worried about is increased traffic and perhaps a bit of privacy, so maybe you should look into password protection after all. Setting up password protection via .htaccess is simple, and there are 610,000 sites on google that match "using .htaccess". I'm sure at least one of them has to be of help.

Also keep in mind that there are plenty of spiders that do not respect robots.txt, so don't count on that file to keep every last word on your site from being archived and searchable for all eternity. Oh... and you typed robot.txt, not robots.txt. I'm pretty sure it's the latter. :)

Cheers!

By: RoseovSharon

RoseovSharon — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:34:49 -0800

Thanks all!

smackfu, in using your example, if I create a link like:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.metafilter.com

... then when Metafilters webmaster looked at their logs, they would not see my url as the referrer, but they would see Google instead?

cactus: I'm not so much worried about traffic, privacy is more the issue. I know a password would take care of the problem, but the other problem is that my friends and family are lazy... if I require a password very few of them would bother to visit my site! I am not after absolute privacy, basically I'm just not wanting to advertise that my site is out there. I don't mind if some random people find it, just looking for ways to minimize that. I do like to share a lot of links, so probably most random people coming to my site would be curious webmasters wanting to know who linked to them... and that's what I want to avoid.

By: null terminated

null terminated — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:36:56 -0800

smackfu, in using your example, if I create a link like:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.metafilter.com

... then when Metafilters webmaster looked at their logs, they would not see my url as the referrer, but they would see Google instead?

Exactly.

By: RoseovSharon

RoseovSharon — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 19:55:27 -0800

AWESOME!

By: ubernostrum

ubernostrum — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 20:33:41 -0800

It's best to use Google for this, as sending bogus referers from other domains can get you marked as a spammer -- my general practice when I see an odd referer is to click through, and if I don't see a link to my site on the allegedly referring page I block incoming referral from anything in that domain.

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 03:38:22 -0800

Browsers vary widely in how they implement the referrer system. There's a good chance that your blog's URL will show up in referrer logs even with the redirect trick.

By: phearlez

phearlez — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 08:19:14 -0800

Why not just put up a username/password challenge that's insanely trivial for anyone who knows you? "What's my middle name?" for example.

By: RoseovSharon

RoseovSharon — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:10:44 -0800

Lets just pretend the password option is out... I really do not want to set up a password.

Plus, even if I did set up a password, this would not block my url in someone's referral log, which is what I want. Sure, they wouldn't get into my site without a password, but my link in their logs would still bring them to my front door. I am not really concerned with a few people getting into the blog itself, I just want to avoid bringing them to the site to begin with.

I appreciate all the suggestions... but really... a password protected site is not what I am looking for or asking about.