Comments on: Encrypting Keywords

By: Jonathan Hinson

Jonathan Hinson — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:54:47 +0000

Why can't you just have your link to the offer be another page on your site where you feed the keyword id or encrypted string (whichever way you do it) and then on that page, it redirects to the offer page with the encrypted keyword appended to the query string? Does the referer header keep the original url even though you redirect from another page?

By: Tob

Tob — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:01:36 +0000

Well put smaxor.

I think there is only a small group of people that actually know how to manipulate the referrer header (myself included) and it is not safe in the hands of a newb.

By: Dankind » Hiding the HTTP Referer with PHP, JS or Meta

Dankind » Hiding the HTTP Referer with PHP, JS or Meta — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:19:45 +0000

[...] there’s been some talk recently in some blogs on the interwebs regarding cloaking/masking/hiding HTTP REFERERs to protect your traffic [...]

By: Smaxor

Smaxor — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:20:59 +0000

You could some how encrypt your keywords but honestly there's no reason. Just as the tracking code I wrote the tutorial on my site takes it out the the url totally and replaces it with a number being passed so there's no "encrypted url" there just a number.

As far as a referer. I don't know how much you know about headers and how many tests you've actually ran but I'm sure it pales in comparison to myself and the group of people I know. I wrote a system to test the different redirects out there and the only ones that don't pass referers consistently are https and meta's. Javascript and header() will pass the referers. Https is an issue because of the warnings IE throws up so it's next to useless. Meta's are the ONLY way to go. I suggest doing a double refresh or waiting 2 seconds if you want to be 100% sure it's gone. I detail all this in my PPC tracking script on my blog.

As far as you guys saying you can set the referer you don't know what you're talking about and need to go back to school. You can only set the referer of the requests your script makes such as requesting a webpage. You can not set the referer header in a users browser. Unless there's some Javascript hole I don't know about.

Mr. Volk please don't write about things you haven't tested because they're just not true.

By: Dankind

Dankind — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:02:53 +0000

adwordsaddict: I don't wanna spam Jonathan's comments but I posted a bit more details from my findings on my personal blog…

By: adwordsaddict

adwordsaddict — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:07:59 +0000

Gee, this would be a great article if Jonathon would actually provide a solution to this problem.

By: Dankind

Dankind — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:07:31 +0000

There's a few ways of accomplishing this:

1) meta redirect as mentioned above

2) javascript redirect

3) https header redirect in php. 'referer's are not passed from https (SSL) urls

By: Jonathan Volk

Jonathan Volk — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:12:58 +0000

You dont need to meta redirect. You can do it with php much faster. Just takes a bit of searching how.

By: Eric Nagel

Eric Nagel — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:03:54 +0000

I think Tob is right. Merchants cannot see beyond the last referrer. But if your referrer is mylandingpage.com/?OVKEY=mykeyword, it doesn't take much to figure out what the keyword is. So meta-redirect.

Iva – I know how to change the referrer when using something like Snoopy, but PHP cannot change the referrer of the user's browser, unless you know a super-secret trick that I've never heard of before.

By: WayneDog

WayneDog — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:19:45 +0000

"You can just make an excel spread sheet and associate each keyword to a number then use the number as your subid"

nope, that won't make a difference if you don't have a landing page or at least a redirect page in between as they can still get your header info easily.