Hiding HTTP Referrers with Linkly: A Comprehensive Guide

In the world of digital marketing and web analytics, understanding and controlling HTTP referrers is crucial. This guide will walk you through what HTTP referrers are, why you might want to hide them, and how Linkly's features empower you to manage this sensitive information effectively, ensuring privacy and strategic data control.

An HTTP referrer is a message sent by a visitor’s browser to a server providing a web page that shows the web address of the page the visitor was on immediately prior.

This helps webmasters know which sites are referring traffic. Webmasters can see the referrers in their analytics.

Sometimes marketers prefer to hide the source of traffic.

Linkly can do this using the Hide referrer function. Hiding referrers can be beneficial for several reasons:

• Privacy: Protect the privacy of your users by not revealing their previous browsing activity to destination sites.
• Cleaner Analytics: Prevent your own domain or specific internal pages from cluttering the referrer reports of destination sites, giving them a clearer view of external traffic sources.
• Competitive Intelligence: In some marketing scenarios, you might want to obscure your traffic sources from competitors or partners.
• Branding: When using custom domains with Linkly, hiding the referrer ensures that only your branded link is seen, rather than the full Linkly URL.

• By default, modern browsers often strip referrer information when navigating from an HTTPS page to an HTTP page (a downgrade). However, referrers can be transmitted between HTTP to HTTP, or HTTPS to HTTPS pages. Linkly's 'Hide referrer' function ensures that no referrer information is sent, regardless of the destination protocol.