I want to track the site URL from where user reached my site.
From where he came i.el, Google, GMail, Facebook, etc.
I tried $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] but it does not contain anything when user click on my site link from any external site but resides the value when I visit among my site pages and this is also not trusted.
So, What I can do from here?
Is there any other way to track the external URL through PHP?
Any idea?
EDIT: Now HTTP_REFERER is able to get the url from most of sites but not able to get the url if user came through Gmail and AOL. What could be the causes?
HTTP_REFERER is the only way to get any information about previous site.
And that is also up to the broser if it supplies that information, most do as default.
Its a header that is set by the browser in the request to your server, if it is not present, then you will never know where the user came from.
If the browser is sending and you still to not get anything on the server check if you have any code that interferes with the $_SERVER variable.
Try this URL, its a google search result that goes to a page that just dumps the HTTP_REFERER.
As the pages indicates, if the box lists (none), then your browser is not sending HTTP_REFERER but if you get a result then the problem is in sour server.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fkarmak.org%2F2004%2Freftest%2Ftest&rct=j&q=http_referer%20test&ei=cNQ2TdGYGsmUOp_ExPoD&usg=AFQjCNFVSmYmQBUcL2l3_ZpmZzVWZztjWg&cad=rja
You can compare it to when you load the page withour google to redirect you:
http://karmak.org/2004/reftest/test
Here is their own start page with link:
http://karmak.org/2004/reftest/
Have you tried it in a variety of browsers? It's down to the browser (As far as I'm aware) to set HTTP_REFERER and sometimes privacy settings can prevent this.
Visitors coming from google can be tracked using google analytics, it gives you the search query terms used before.
This solution also track a lot of other things from your visitors. I undertand it's not PHP based, but it's the only other kind of solution I know if HTTP_REFERRER is not enough to you, and as you quoted google...
Related
I am trying the following. I have a facebook ad that has redirect link. This link leads to lets say xyz.com. I have have access to xyz.com.
I like to find out from where the user came from to xyz.com.
Basically, I am trying to avoid to let people copy the link from the facebook ad and put on their personal sites. Is that even possible to detect whether through Javascript or PHP if possible.
In PHP, there is the global variable $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] available, but it contains a value provided by the client (the browser when interacting with humans) and cannot be relied on to be consistently set. If there is a redirect in between, possibly you see only the server where the redirect is coming from. JavaScript has the history object, but does not allow you to see its contents for privacy reasons.
If you do not need 100% reliability, I would propose to log the data in $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] for a few days and then have an eye on the records, thus allowing you to spot how the traffic origin is distributed.
Depending on your server's settings, the referer may also be contained in the access log. For Apache, see the documentation here.
I have a secure link direction service I'm running (expiringlinks.co). If I change the headers in php to redirect my visitors, then facebook is able to show a preview of the website I'm redirecting to when users send links to one another via facebook. I wish to avoid this. Right now, I'm using an AJAX call to get the URL and javascript to redirect, but it's causing problems for users who don't use javascript.
Here are a number of ways I'd like to block facebook, but I can't seem to get working:
I've tried blocking the facebook bot (facebookexternalhit/1.0 and facebookexternalhit/1.1) but it's not working, I don't think they're using them for this functionality.
I'm thinking of blocking the facebook IP addresses, but I can't find all of them, and I don't think it'll work unless I get all of them.
I've thought of using a CAPTCHA or even a button, but I can't bring myself to do that to my visitors. Not to mention I don't think anyone would use the site.
I've searched the facebook docs for meta tags that would "opt-me out", but haven't found one, and doubt that I would trust it if I had.
Any creative ideas or any idea how to implement the ones above? Thank you so much in advance!
Try this - it works for me ...
<?php
$ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if (preg_match('/facebookexternalhit/si',$ua)) {
header('Location: no_fb_page.php');
die() ;
}
?>
You could try to get the logfile of your Webserver, and search there for unusal useragents. (maybe containing facebook)
Or, otherwise get the Logs and delete every containing internet explorer/firefox/opera...
Then you should have only bots useragents in the end.
Then you could search for the facebook one.
All you need to do is appropriately set up robots.txt.
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
You could try using a meta refresh instead of a javascript redirect. They work for all browsers and because the page still returns a 200 response any crawler should stop resolving there.
Is it possible to get remote username when I get a referral link without involving any server side code from the referral link?
Do you mean like if I clicked a link to your site on Stack Overflow, you would want to be able to see that my username is "Agent Conundrum"? No, you can't do that without the help of the referring site. The only information you should be able to get is the (permanently misspelled) HTTP_REFERER in the $_SERVER superglobal array, which tells you the page the user came from. Even then, there are ways to block or change this so you shouldn't count on it being set (especially since it wouldn't be set if the user navigated directly to your page via the address bar).
Frankly, I wouldn't want to use a site that leaked personal information (and for some sites, even the username qualifies as personal information), and I wouldn't want to use a site that tries to harvest such leaked information without my knowledge.
Generally, any site where you have a legitimate reason to broadcast this information would have some sort of API built in, like FacebookConnect. Even then, it should be strictly opt-in for the user.
As a general thing: no. The HTTP protocol does not involve the transmission of a remote user name.
Hey, it could help to answer if you would be a little more specific on which kind of service are you trying to fetch the data from.
Large/Public services tend to have somekind of an accessible API that you can fork on your referrer, but other than that its mostly that you need to regexp the site and know the structure of the HTML pretty much.
My adsense ad have a dedicated land page.
I want to show the content only to those who came through that ad.
The page is coded with PHP so I'm using $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'].
Two questions here:
Is there a better alternative to $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] ?
To what strings/domains should I compare the referrer's domain (I'll handle extracting it)? I mean, I'm guessing that google has more than one domain they're using for the ads, or not? There's doubleclick.com.... any other domain? How can I check it, besides try/fail?
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] is the canonical way to determine where a click came from generally. There are more reliable (and complicated) methods for clicks within a site you fully control, but that's not much help for clicks from Google. Yes, it can be spoofed, and yes, it can be null, but as long as you're not targeting nuclear weapons based on that data, and you can handle null values gracefully, it should be good enough.
As for domains, you have to consider the international google domains, as well as all the google*.com domains.
I suggest adding a parameter on the link you give to Google. i.e. instead of yoursite.com/landing, do yoursite.com/landing?campaign=12.
If you are concerned that curious users will play with this parameter, the fix is simple-- redirect via a server 301 redirect when they hit that URL.
That is, if I request yoursite.com/landing?campaign=12, your server--before serving a page-- should log my visit to campaign 12 and redirect me to the plain url yoursite.com/landing. This has the added advantage that reloads won't increment your campaign hit count.
Yes, users could still mess with the original link if they are clever or curious enough to look at it before they click on it, but I think this is going to be far more effective than sniffing the referer.
Rather than trying to work out on your own how to measure your page views, you can consider using an existing system for that, like Google Analytics
So, I can use getenv('HTTP_REFERER') to get an URL which the member has visited previously, but it works only if it's the same website. I want this:
for example. the member firstly visits google.com then goes to my website. I want to show him, that previously he visited a google.com website. How can I do it if it's possible?
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] works fine for either case, as long as they followed a link from google.com to get to your site. Example: http://mrozekma.com/referer.php
You can only use the HTTP_REFERER header, and capture it the moment the visitor comes to your site. It might not be set, it might be false. There is no other way (and rightly so, I value my privacy). If you need to 'remember' the data store it in a session.
The simple answer is this is not possible. You can get the direct referrer if you're lucky, but nothing else (i.e. not the referrer of the referrer for example). Being able to retrieve the full history of a browser tab via JavaScript or post-back would be a major security issue.
Grabbing a browser's history is considered a breach of privacy, so any method that might exist to grab it would be considered a security bug in the browser.
Note that even the HTTP_REFERER header is considered to be a privacy issue by many people, so it's either disabled or filtered quite often (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer#Referrer_hiding).