Do you hide your referrer?

[azureus]

Hi,

I got this idea because my affiliate manager (I won't mention the program) contacted me yesterday and asked me to send him a list of my traffic sources and what keywords I rank in Google...

I thought about it and I have a really crappy feeling about this. This way, AMs can just copy your business model, your traffic source your niche or whatever... I don't know who can I trust, an AM can be an affiliate himself for what I know.

Do you protect against this in some way? Maybe it would be a good idea to hide your referer.
I don't mean your affiliate link but the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable.

Basically when an user lands on your site, his browser keeps the referer information (e.g. google(dot)com/search?q=keyword). Maybe you also use the UTM parameters because you want to track the traffic in Google Analytics (e.g. yoursite(dot)com/utm_source=xxx&utm_medium=ppc).

The problem is that the affiliate network can see this information as well if you don't hide it.

So, do you hide it somehow? I guess a double redirect would work.

 

[Engineer]

You are on the right track... NEVER give that sort of information to the affiliate program.

Double redirects or double meta-refreshes work sometimes, but not on all browsers. I came across an example a while ago that used a form submit redirect, which worked across the board, but I didn't bookmark the example, so you'll have to search for it.

Hiding the referring URL may be a good idea if it contains information about how people got to that URL (like the keyword or PPC parameters you posted in your example), but if there is nothing like that in the URL -- i.e. no info about how the visitor arrived to your own site before they click out to the casino, then it might not be worth the trouble. If you are doing PPC, though, you should definitely find a way to hide that information.

 

[Vladi]

Use this free dereferer or follow their instructions to make your own dereferer page.

dereferer.org - free derefering service