Information needed: "Best way to wipe clean traffics referring information?
 

What is the best way you've found to wipe the referrer information off traffic.

With the state of the industry the way it is (sales down for some etc.).....more & more affiliate reps are stealing traffic source information & passing it on to other affiliates (or using it for themselves)

So lets take a moment to go over some "known" & "new" ways to wipe that referrer information right off a click.

Please post scripting ideas, re-direction ideas, php, aspx etc.

Whats the method you use these days?

Other than my method....the baseball bat. :pimp

I'm curious as well.

baseball bat sounds good ......... this is gonna be a gr8 thread...... :)

Nahh in all seriousness, this sounds very interesting and I'd love to hear about referrer cleaning scripts.... I can't imagine getting 20K+ keywords, cleaning them up, grouping them, refining ads every hour/day and after I've done all that work have an fucking affiliate manager steal the keywords that are converting from the referrer URL..... thats really fucked up....

yup real fucked up....so I'm going to start suggesting to all affiliates to use some industrial grade scripts to hide their traffic

and start using hosts who have high-paid techs....because obviously cheap technical support at your hosting company is another very weak link

i will bump this when i wake up today

OK ... now I understand why you were asking for that industrial grade script the other day....it makes sense......I'll bump this in the morning as well :thumbsup

best way is send all your traffic to http://mydomain.com/out.php?trafficcode
this will set http://mydomain.com/out.php?trafficode as the refer for your traffic.
At admin you can setup for each code what program should recive your traffic.
and no one can know the source.
you can also play with geo or with other traffic options to control your traffic good.

I use my own custom made software to have a full control over my traffic. :)

for a price I'll let you re-direct everything through one of my machines

I do something sort of like this.

I've been doing that for a couple of years now. I had a few FPAs that I made, tweaked and re-tweaked and were doing really, really well with my MGP traffic. As soon as I got those to < 1:200 on MGP traffic (yes, really) I found a couple of other affiliates who copied the ads layout almost exactly. The only way they could have known about it was an affiliate rep showing them what was working for me.

Now I have a PHP script that uses sqlite to manage where my traffic goes. domain.com?c=x&i=randomcode

create your own landing pages that redirect to sponsor

I like the 'ol flash swf file that pops a new window when it's loaded :)

use google translator.

http://translate.google.com/translat...www.break.com/

I have a script which strips it out well. What you do is setup up 2 domains. The first is a site hosting the landing page. You then have a regular link from that landing page to an intermediary page. You then have a combination of javascript/cgi based redirector which will make the intermediary page the referrer so the spy will only see the intermediary page.
WG

all the really cool flash tricks were wiped out with the newest I.E., but i know what you're talking about :thumbsup

What he said.. I have a domain that's only used for redirecting to the sponsor.. So a lot of my sites link to that domain and that domain redirects to the sponsor. However, you need to use javacript or a meta page refresh at least once. Better to use javascript as it will also help to filter out a lot of bots.

meta redirect generally will not send any information

Unfortunately, it often leaks the referrer. Most of the times you are right, but it isn't 100% secure.

yea it leaks here....obviously....i've been using it for years too

unknowingly fucking myself over

Yeah, i was wrong, its not javascript, its a combination of iframes and server side redirection (perl). Test our the link I sent you pr0 and if it works, i'll get you the source.
WG

I remember reading somewhere that https to http redirection does not pass referrer but I haven&#180;t really tried.
I dont have firefox to test with the LiveHTTP headers extension right now, but I&#180;ll do a check later

very simple, send to another domain and have a javascript redirect on the corresponding landing page on the second domain

What do you do when you have to use sponsor iframes? I would assume you can't use iframes if you wanna protect the traffic source.

I guess I have been, too.

I have one domain, with a meta refresh page for each sponsor link and a counter for the referrer, that all other domains link to.

Stripped reffering urls triggers alerts on our systems. If you hide your referring urls, we'll assume you are sending us illegal traffic, and look at your account VERY closely. Why are you so paranoid?

interesting thread

I had a recent incident where a sponsor jacked my referring information & gave the traffic source out to others.

And a sponsor can alert my account all they want :1orglaugh

Just wait till i see them at a show.....

I'm still getting paid :pimp

Because there are places/people that will rip you off.

How many times I setup a PPC with no competition on the site. Gotten a temp pass for YSM, and a few days later had a competing ad for the sponsor show up(generally with a very low account number).

I would say then, don't push a sponsor you don't trust with that info.

Steve I've known ya for years bro.....& you should know i only do business with people i trust. It ended up being someone i did trust....& they ripped off one of my friends traffic methods. Actually they didn't rip it off, they simply told mad people about it.

And sure enough a week later, we saw the competition pushing the same program, in our space.

I really can't believe your on here busting my balls though man....I've always looked up to you :disgust

I'm not busting your balls, I'm just pointing out AN HONEST SPONSOR'S PERSPECTIVE on referral hiding.

Ok well let me be honest. If I'm pushing a program who has ANY # of new affiliate managers, who may or may not have access to see what I'm doing on a PPC campaign for example. I think I'd like to hide my referrer info for now on.

When i start pushing lightspeedcash again, trust me...I'll have no want/need to hide my referral info because i know you're not a dick. And i also know everyone that works for you personally.

Its kind of a "situation" based choice i believe.

That's a two way street though, and the list of "trustworthy sponsors" who have fucked their affiliates is long. Trust takes years to build. If a sponsor didn't want my traffic because I hid the referring URLs, it's not like there isn't hundreds more who will take it. If they don't trust it's legit, that is not my problem.

I use a "go.php" redirect with integers for the site I'm sending traffic to.

http://www.domain.com/go.php?s=14 - Like that

I have been using this for years for all my accts. When a affiliate program changes sites, programs or links, one simple change of code changes every single promotional link I've made across the web :winkwink:

My problem with the simple php redirect is that its not scalable... unless you want to send all your traffic to one domain, or have that script on all xxxx domains you're using? I use the second option on PPC stuff, but on a mass scale it doesn't seem very convenient.

I suppose you could spoof the url shown and just pull from a central db somehow..

Exactly.