If I put a rel="nofollow" will the referrer site will appear on Google Analytics of example.com?
Example:
Referrer site is: referrer.com
nofollow is intended to prevent the bot from going TO the site in the link (or any link if it's in a meta tag).
ie: Site-A has a link:
<a rel="nofollow" href="//site-b.com">Site-B</a>
That nofollow is meant to tell Google that it shouldn't consider the two sites to be linked together.
Or two pages, or whatever.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Tells Google that it shouldn't index THIS page in its search.
In your case, you're looking for a way to remove the JavaScript:document.referrer from Site-B. You can't do that from Site-A. When a user clicks from Site-A to Site-B, once they're on Site-B (where GA is installed), there's nothing that you can do from Site-A to prevent it.
There's no way to do that, without sending a user to your own server, and manually redirecting to/from elsewhere, using apache, or using some other server-side solution... Even then, the referral will come from somewhere -- it's just a case of where that somewhere, is.
HOWEVER if you're talking about two sites that YOU OWN and you're trying to exclude Site-A from Site-B's reporting, there are ways of doing that from within the GA control panel. You can add filters on the traffic to exclude IPs or domains.
Or, if you control the GA tracking codes on Site-B, you can do:
_gaq.push(["_addIgnoredRef", "Site-A.com"]);
If, however, you're working for Company-A, and you don't want people in Company-B to see your site in their report... ...that's where it can't be done without serious server-side header-manipulation.
No Change
clicking a link with rel="nofollow" will still send the current page as the referer.
A User browsing is not influenced by rel="nofollow"
nofollow applies to bots (site crawlers), google analytics tracks users (who are not bots). As such the nofollow on a link will have no effect on google analytics statistics - because it doesn't modify real-user activity.
Yes, it will appear as a referer. Nofollow tells robots not to follow this link and doesn't affect clients browser behaviour in any way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
Related
I have to link some other external sites.
I know when to use nofollow. But I am not clear when I should use rel=noreferrer.
In short, the noreferrer link type hides referrer information when the link is clicked. A link with the noreferrer link type looks something like this:
Click here for more info
If someone arrives at your site from a link that uses this link type, your analytics won't show who refered that link. Instead, it will mistakenly show as direct traffic in your acquisition channels report.
If you have an external link to someone else's site you don't trust and you want to hide referrer information then you can combine both and use
Other Domain Link
I advise you to use nofollow links for the following content:
Links in comments or on forums - Anything that has user-generated content is likely to be a source of spam. Even if you carefully moderate, things will slip through.
Advertisements & sponsored links - Any links that are meant to be advertisements or are part of a sponsorship arrangement must be nofollowed.
Paid links - If you charge in any way for a link (directory submission, quality assessment, reviews, etc.), nofollow the outbound links
noreferrer doesn't just block the HTTP referrer header, it also prevents a Javascript exploit involving window.opener
Link
Looks innocuous enough, but there's a hole because, by default, the page that's being opened is allowing the opened page to call back into it via window.opener. There are some restrictions, being cross-domain, but there's still some mischief that can be done
window.opener.location = 'http://gotcha.badstuff';
With noreferrer most browsers will disallow the window.opener exploit
As #unor said, it hides referrer information when the link is clicked. Basically this is a privacy enhancement for when you want to hide from the owner of the linked domain that the user came from your website.
Example:
User is on your website www.mywebsite.com, there you have a Link. When someone clicks the "Link" the owner of newsite.com knows it came from www.mywebsite.com. By setting rel=noreferrer you prevent revealing this information.
A good example how it works is starting from 21:28 of this conference talk. This is considered to be a good practice when working with server-side (e.g. Node.js). You can also read about this on the Helmet documentation.
You'll o ly need to use this on private pages or pages you dont want to advertise. E.g. a webmail or private bug tracker would be considered private and you don't want to leak any information to the external linked websites.
Sensitive public pages, like medical information or other sensitive topics may also want to mask the referrer header.
I have to link some other external sites.
I know when to use nofollow. But I am not clear when I should use rel=noreferrer.
In short, the noreferrer link type hides referrer information when the link is clicked. A link with the noreferrer link type looks something like this:
Click here for more info
If someone arrives at your site from a link that uses this link type, your analytics won't show who refered that link. Instead, it will mistakenly show as direct traffic in your acquisition channels report.
If you have an external link to someone else's site you don't trust and you want to hide referrer information then you can combine both and use
Other Domain Link
I advise you to use nofollow links for the following content:
Links in comments or on forums - Anything that has user-generated content is likely to be a source of spam. Even if you carefully moderate, things will slip through.
Advertisements & sponsored links - Any links that are meant to be advertisements or are part of a sponsorship arrangement must be nofollowed.
Paid links - If you charge in any way for a link (directory submission, quality assessment, reviews, etc.), nofollow the outbound links
noreferrer doesn't just block the HTTP referrer header, it also prevents a Javascript exploit involving window.opener
Link
Looks innocuous enough, but there's a hole because, by default, the page that's being opened is allowing the opened page to call back into it via window.opener. There are some restrictions, being cross-domain, but there's still some mischief that can be done
window.opener.location = 'http://gotcha.badstuff';
With noreferrer most browsers will disallow the window.opener exploit
As #unor said, it hides referrer information when the link is clicked. Basically this is a privacy enhancement for when you want to hide from the owner of the linked domain that the user came from your website.
Example:
User is on your website www.mywebsite.com, there you have a Link. When someone clicks the "Link" the owner of newsite.com knows it came from www.mywebsite.com. By setting rel=noreferrer you prevent revealing this information.
A good example how it works is starting from 21:28 of this conference talk. This is considered to be a good practice when working with server-side (e.g. Node.js). You can also read about this on the Helmet documentation.
You'll o ly need to use this on private pages or pages you dont want to advertise. E.g. a webmail or private bug tracker would be considered private and you don't want to leak any information to the external linked websites.
Sensitive public pages, like medical information or other sensitive topics may also want to mask the referrer header.
I have a website with promotional content. Let's call it website A. On this website, I give a URL to an advertiser website where people are buying something. Let's call it website B.
If I use rel="noreferrer" (like here: How can I hide a link's origin from the linked-to site's analytics?), is it possible for the owner of website B to find out where does the traffic come from?
I want to hide the origin of the users so I am secured.
It is not possible for the owner of site B to find out where the traffic comes from.
Readers can click on the links, but the destination site will not see that they came from your site.
Source
You can also use HTTPS, which will not send any referral information.
In summary, you're secure.
The company I work for has replaced our previously very flexible website with a much more restrictive "website in a box" technology. I have my web pages hosted on Google Sites and would like to redirect people to those pages. When I attempt to do this via javascript it gets stripped from the page when its saved. I do not have access to the section to attempt the depreciated method of redirecting.
Is there another method available to automatically redirect a customer other than just posting a link in a restricted environment like this?
If you're limited to using HTML to do the redirect, you can use a meta redirect:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://example.com/">
Though note that its use is deprecated because it may be disorienting to the user. In addition to the <meta> tag, you can add <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/"> to let search engines know that the targeted page is the canonical one.
Edit: if Google Sites won't allow you to change the <head> HTML, the Javascript, or the PHP, then it's time to go searching for solutions within Google Sites itself. One solution that pops up pretty frequently in searches seems to be using a URL Redirect Gadget.
On the page you want to redirect from, click the Edit Page button, then Insert Menu, then More Gadgets. Once there, search for "redirect gadgets" and some widgets that should help will show up.
These instructions are based on advice given in the Google Products forums. I don't have a Google Site myself, so I can't verify that they work.
Search engines and pre-fetching browser plugins can cause quite some trouble with <a> elements where the destination page changes the state of the server. In a <form>, I'd mark it as modifying with method="POST". Is there a similar way to mark regular links as modifying?
rel="nofollow" does not solve the problem. From the specification:
By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines)
A plain old link can only make get requests. A get request, as you indicated, should not trigger any destructive changes.
The solution, if you can't or don't want to have a form in your page at that point, is to have the link point to a page that does have a form. For instance, if you have a "delete" link it might point to a page that says "Are you sure you want to delete X? [delete]".
Then, if you don't want people to have to leave the page every time they delete something, you can implement some AJAX functionality in JavaScript.