301 redirect that hides HTTP referral

Question

How can I have a custom home made short URL that performs a 301 redirect and also hides the referring site. Basically the short URL is a simple html file that contains a bitly link. Currently I'm using the following code inside the html file which is doing the trick

   <script language="javascript">
      location.replace("http://bit.ly/xxxxxxxxx")
   </script>

However but I'm seeing a large number of discrepancy between what Publishers are reporting and what bitly is reporting in terms of clicks. I'm hoping to avoid this discrepancy by doing a 301 redirect instead.

On that note, is there a free source shortening url service that does 301 while Hiding HTTP referrals? I've looked around in GitHub and the ones I've looked at so far doesn't offer such feature.

Thanks in advance

Not sure that this is possible. If the client is sending the referral header, you can't really stop them. You can, however, send 301 redirects using the PHP `header()` function. — Scott Stevens, Jun 18 '12 at 00:33

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

2

What the client sends for a referer is up to it, not you. There is nothing you can do about this.

See this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1398318/362536

Turns out that the RFC for HTTP doesn't state what the client should do with the refer header, so it isn't surprising to see mixed results.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

1
1

answered Jun 18 '12 at 00:33

Brad

159,648
54
349
530

301 redirect that hides HTTP referral

1 Answers1