Double Meta Refresh Tutorial – Hide Your Traffic Sources!

I wrote a double meta refresh tutorial on the PPC Coach forums, but I wanted to post something similar to my blog as well. For those who not familiar with what a double meta refresh (DMR) is, it is basically a method that allows you to blank your referer. This is useful in the situation where you don’t want your affiliate manager to see where your traffic is coming from to an offer.

CPA Polls are an example of a method where you will want to implement this. Although there are some networks that don’t mind poll traffic, I know for a fact most CPA networks do not like polls. If you get caught sending this type of traffic, you risk getting banned from an offer, or even worse, not getting paid.

There are also many other legitimate reasons why you might want to cloak your traffic. Your traffic sources are one of the most valuable assets you own as an affiliate marketer and you don’t want unscrupulous affiliate networks or just rogue affiliate managers stealing them. Using a double meta refresh is one way to protect yourself and your income. Keep in mind though that there are certain networks that will threaten you if you blank your referers. CJ.com is one example. However, I haven’t had a problem with CPA networks in general when using this method.

To help you follow along with the rest of this article, I’ve put up a simple double meta refresh demo page here:

http://freepayperclicktools.com/dmr/

To see what I mean about showing the referer, click on the link in Scenario 1 on my demo page. This is just a regular link that you will find on any website. The link will take you to another page where you can see it displays the exact url of where you just came from.

To implement the DMR, you need to create 2 PHP files. The initial link will now go to the first PHP file, which will “meta-refresh” to the 2nd PHP file and then “meta-refresh” to your destination. Hence the term double meta refresh. This will result in your referer showing up as “blank”. Try this by clicking on the links in Scenario 2 or 3. Below is the code for PHP file 1 and PHP file 2.

PHP File 1

<html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://xyz.com/pathtofile2.php" />
    </head>
</html>

PHP File 2

<html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://xyz.com/offer.php" />
    </head>
</html>

One important thing to note is that there is a downside to using DMR. It doesn’t work across all browsers! Sure it works fine on the two major browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, it doesn’t work on Safari, Chrome and Opera. If you have one of those browsers at your disposal, open one of them up and try clicking on my the two DMR links. Notice that the referer leaks out. This is bad, as just one leaked referer is enough to get you in trouble.

One solution is to put the first PHP file on your initial domain, and the second PHP file on a separate, unrelated domain. When you do that, a user using Safari would have its referer show up as coming from this unrelated domain. This is probably ok, as an affiliate manager still won’t be able to tell where the original source of traffic is coming from.

If you don’t want to buy an extra domain for the double-meta-refresh, you can actually place the two php files on the same domain. However, you will need to make an additional modification to the 2nd PHP file to protect yourself.

PHP File 2

<?php
$referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if($referer == "")
{
	echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://xyz.com/offer.php";    
}
else
{
	echo "<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"0;url=http://somewherelse.com";    
}
?>

Basically, this code checks if the referer is blank, and if it is, the user will be redirected to the offer. If it is not (ie. the visitor is using Safari or Chrome) then they will be redirected to some other page. As you can see, the cost of blanking your referer in this way will cause a certain percentage of visitors to never make it to your offer.

Using a double meta refresh is not the only way to cloak your traffic sources. If you use the free Tracking202 script for tracking, you can use the built in cloaking functionality of the script to hide your traffic. This doesn’t blank the referer, but instead shows the location of your tracking script as the referer. You can also use SSL to cloak your traffic as well, but I will leave that for another post. Let me know if you found this double meta refresh tutorial useful.