Sick of people stealing your hard-earned work? Ever worked hard to find a good landing page for an offer and then only days later everything slow downs...over and over again? Ever felt that a certain affiliate network was copying your strategies? Ever made $250 a day for a week, then suddenly your profits went down to $20 then $10 then $2 and then NOTHING....

Then you need to hide your referrer.

About Hiding Referers

Hiding referers in the sense on how we; ppc affiliates using them is to cloak/spoof/hide the incoming referering traffic to the networks we work with. In other words, as affiliates if you hide your referer, you can hide from the network where your traffic is coming from. The reason you would want to do this is because if you do not hide your incoming referers the network with whom you work with will know where all of your traffic is coming from.

If they know where all of your traffic is coming from, they will see the keywords your bidding on and the text advertisements you have written, they will also be able to see the landing pages your using. In other words, if you do not hide your incoming referers the networks you work with will know everything about your campaign. This is a bad thing.

As affiliates we are getting paid to promote other peoples' products and services, if we reveal to them everything we are doing to generate traffic they no longer need us. In that they can simply shut us down and then start bidding on the keywords themselves, they can copy your landing pages and use them for their own needs because if you do not hide your referers they will see everything your doing. Keep in mind that most networks promote their own offers internally, so if they see all your keywords don't be surprised if they start bidding on them themselves. They too can make money off promoting offers via ppc, and this is why you want to hide your referers, you don't want them to know where your traffic is coming from, just like you don't want other affiliates to know your keywords, likewise you don't want the network with whom you work with to have all of your keywords. So that is why we hide, and I'm going to show how to do it here.

How Does Hiding Referers Work

So know you know a little bit about why we hide our referers, let me share with you how it works. So again, basically whenever someone clicks on a link to another website for instance, that website which receives the new visitor can find out by using some PHP code, or some other type of code, where that visitor came from. So if you click through a link on our website to AffiliateNetwork.com for instance, AffiliateNetwork.com automatically can find that you came from GabInternet.com, they do this by checking your browser's http referer information. In other words, AffiliateNetwork.com can check where their visitors come from, so in order to difuse this we need to make it look like we came from a different website!

So this is how it works, now instead of clicking through a link straight to AffiliateNetwork.com you clicked on a link to example.com/redirect.php, and then on example.com/redirect.php it redirected to you AffiliateNetwork.com. Now what happens is AffiliateNetwork.com thinks you came from example.com/redirect.php, because that was the last landing page you landed on before going to AffiliateNetwork.com. See we have hidden the referer, so they can no longer tell you came from GabInternet.com, because you clicked on a link to example.com/redirect.php first, and then that page loaded on your browser, it then redirected you to AffiliateNetwork.com, so when AffiliateNetwork.com pulls the referer data it thinks you can from example.com/redirect.php instead of GabInternet .com.

Now I know this might seem a little confusing so I will illustrate it below

• Without Hiding
• GabInternet.com » AffiliateNetwork.com
• In the above example, AffiliateNetworkcom can tell GabInternet.com was the referer

• With Hiding
• GabInternet.com » Example.com/redirect.php » AffiliateNetwork.com
• Notice now, you are going to AffiliateNetworkcom through example.com/redirect.php, AffiliateNetwork.com now thinks that you came from example.com/redirect.php, you have succesfully hidden this referer. AffiliateNetwork.com does not know now that you came from GabInternet.com, it thinks you came from Example.com/redirect.php.

So you see in the above examples, AffiliateNetwork.com now thinks your visitor came from example.com/redirect.php, bceause that is the last referer the visitor was at before coming to AffiliateNetwork.com. This is how hiding the referer works.

How To Set It Up

You now know how hiding the referers works, basically instead of directly linking to AffiliateNetwork.com, we link to another page, in this case, example.com/redirect.php instead, which then redirects the visitor toAffiliateNetwork .com.

So to set it up is quite simple, instead of making your links to AffiliateNetwork.com, make your links point to a different page that will redirect your visitors toAffiliateNetwork .com. So for instance, you could now link your visitors to mydomain.com/redirect.php, so then you would want to change all your outbound links to mydomain.com/redirect.php, and then we will redirect out to AffiliateNetwork.com instead. Below I will show you the code you need to place on mydomain.com/redirect.php to succesfully redirect a visitor out to AffiliateNetwork.com with referer hiding.

Redirect.php

<html>

    <!-- Replace http://AffiliateNetwork.com with whatever url you like !-->

    <head>
        <title>AffiliateNetwork</title>
        <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://AffiliateNetwork.com">
    </head>
    <body>
    
        <form name="form1" id="form1" method="get" action="http://AffiliateNetwork.com"></form>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            document.form1.submit();
        </script>
    
        <div style="padding: 30px; text-align: center;">
            You are being automatically redirected to AffiliateNetwork.<br/><br/>
            Page Stuck? <a href="http://AffiliateNetwork.com">Click Here</a>.
        </div>
        
    </body>
</html> 

Conclusion

Now instead of hyper-linking directly to AffiliateNetwork.com any more, you change your links to your redirect.php file, which you can name whatever you want, and then it'll redirect the visitor with AffiliateNetwork.com; with AffiliateNetwork.com now unable to see the true referer source! On the AffiliateNetwork.com side it will appear as the visitor now came from redirect.php, but they really came from a different page, but because we hid the referer, AffiliateNetwork.com only sees redirect.php as the referer. You have now hidden the referer successfully.

Good Practice: You should always test everything after setting up a hidden redirect to make sure your visitors go through properly.

Source:

http://prosper.tracking202.com/scripts/cloaking-referers/