Hide the referrer
What is the referrer?
The referrer identifies the webpage that the previous request come from. As an example, if I go to google to look for something, then I click on the result http://mysite.com, mysite.com will be able to know that I come from google.
You can test it yourself: go to http://www.whatismyreferer.com/ directly (by typing the url in your browser). You will see that it can't find any referrer, because you enter the url directly in your browser.
Now, go to google and enter "whatismyreferer". First results will redirect you to the same website. But this time you will see the referrer : google website.
Why it matters on autosurf?
The referrer is often use by advertisement companies and most of the time, they don't like to see that the traffic of your website come from an autosurf.
A simple look at google analytics, which track the sources of traffic on my website will show me that some visitors come from Otohits:
Technically speaking, this is due to the autosurf system itself, when Otohits choose the next website to see, the browser know that it comes from Otohits and pass the referrer to the seen website.
How to manage the visibility of the referrer on Otohits?
Otohits gives you the possibility to hide the referrer! it means that the visited website will not be able to see the referrer.
On Otohits, the visibility of the referrer can be enable and disabled for each of your websites separately.
Go to your "My Sites" page. You will see that all your websites have a Referrer icon (the little guy which is grey or green).
By default it is set to "Visible" (grey icon). it means that the referrer will not be hidden for your website and the referrer will be transmit when someone will visit your site.
If you want to hide the referrer on one of your website, just click on the referrer icon and the status will be changed to "Hidden" (green icon), meaning that you site will no longer see the referrer of visitors that come from Otohits!
You can also activate this option in the details page of your website:
On which type of website is it useful?
Hiding the referrer on PTP should be useless 99% of the time. It is useful when you're affiliate to advertising systems. A direct visit (no referrer) is much more valuable that a visit that comes from an autosurf and will prevent you from having any problems.
Are they any downside?
Hidding the referer on Otohits has a cost. If you activate this option, it will cost you 2 times more points than a classic visit. For example, if your website has a 15 seconds timer and you hide the referer, each visit will cost you 30 points.
We don't recommend to use the Hide referrer functionality if your site url is not fully W3C compliant and use specific url rewrite rules: if you have a website with an url that looks like this: http://mysite.com/article.php/?/2013-01-01/myarticle.html.