Over the years, many people have asked me to give them data on, or act based on, the site that a user is coming from when they hit our pages.
- Can we find out exactly how many people came to this page from that tweet?
- If someone comes to the site after searching Google for X, can we redirect them to ?
- Can we show a message to anyone who ends up on the site after a redirect from the old site?
There is a common misconception that we can always determine that information through the referrer (the HTTP_Referer header). In reality, this is often not available, and there is nothing that can be done to change that fact. I’ll suggest some alternative paths at the end of this article, but depending on the situation there might not be any real options.
A quick overview of the HTTP_Referer header
Imagine a user is visiting a random web page out in the world, say http://www.example.com/foo.html, and clicks a link on that page to visit my site at https://www.duncanmackenzie.net. The source of that traffic to my site is useful to you as a site owner, it can help you understand the impact of various marketing activities for example, so a header was defined to allow browsers to pass that source link along. At the most basic level, when a user clicks a link to page B on page A, the request for that new page (B) will contain a header (HTTP_Referer, and yes that is a spelling mistake on the word referrer) telling the new page that the user was coming from page A. One common use of this header, was to look for referrals from Google or another search engine, and then extract the search term from the URL. If I go to Google.com and search for Duncan Mackenzie Microsoft, then the URL of my page of results is:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Duncan+Mackenzie+Microsoft&source=hp&ei=X-rkYJHyOeKc0PEPrO6hsAE&iflsig=AINFCbYAAAAAYOT4b4Cz7MUaxenq5zP_Ktnl9jqHwrhp&oq=Duncan+Mackenzie+Microsoft&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBggAEBYQHjoOCC4QsQMQxwEQowIQkwI6CAgAELEDEIMBOgIIADoFCAAQsQM6CwguELEDEMcBEKMCOggILhDHARCjAjoFCC4QsQM6BQgAEMkDOgUIABCSAzoCCC46CAguEMcBEK8BOggILhCxAxCTAjoICC4QsQMQgwE6BwgAELEDEAo6BQguEJMCOgcILhAKEJMCOgQIABAKOgQILhAKOggIABAWEAoQHlC9E1iiNWCBN2gEcAB4AIABdogBsQ-SAQQyNy4xmAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpeg&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwjRnZrKz8_xAhViDjQIHSx3CBYQ4dUDCAo&uact=5
In the olden days, it was common for analytics software to extract the q=Duncan+Mackenzie+Microsoft bit out of that URL. Now you know what search terms led the user to your site and by the absence of a start=10 query in there, you can also determine the user found this link on the first page of their search results. Great info and very helpful to the site owner, but it is also a gaping security/privacy hole for the user.
Security and Privacy implications of referral information
The privacy issues inherent in a referral URL might not be immediately obvious when we are looking at random queries on Google, but it doesn’t take long to construct a more concerning scenario. Imagine I’m on a forum focused on LBTQIA+ topics, and for whatever reason (based on where I live or even just personal preference) I wouldn’t want people to know that I frequent that particular site. Now, as part of some discussion on that forum, someone suggests a great product over on Amazon.com and provides a link… by clicking that link, I’m giving Amazon some information I probably didn’t intend to share. Should that matter and would Amazon do anything with that info? It honestly doesn’t matter, the key here is: some information, private to you, is being shared without you intending it to be.
The security side of this is a bit harder to find an easy example, but it is not uncommon for sites to put some type of identifying information about you or your session into the URL (I’ve seen ?display_name=Duncan or ?uid=<guid> in URLs on various sites before) and now that information is being sent out to some random untrusted site just because you clicked on a link. Once again, you have no way of knowing if that information on its own is a real security issue, but it is being transmitted and that’s an issue.
The types of issues I’ve described were spotted pretty quickly by security/privacy experts and by the browser teams themselves, and the end result is that (with modern browsers) full referral information is rarely transmitted from one site to another. This is due to something known as the referral policy, and more specifically by the default policy browsers have implemented. I’m not going to go into a full explanation of this topic and how to use it on your pages, my focus in this article is what this means for you if you are interested in looking at referral information.
Going back to our Google search example, one of the links on that search result page was to a post on my blog. If you open up the network tab of your browser dev tools and then click on the link, you can see exactly what Referer header is being passed. In any modern browser, this header will be:
referer: https://www.google.com/
Just the origin is being passed, even though that is not the URL I was on before clicking the link, and this is missing all the useful info like the query terms that brought me to this results page. This is ‘by design’, as Google has set a meta tag on the search result pages of :
<meta content="origin" name="referrer"\>
The value of “origin” for the referrer meta tag (note that the meta tag is correctly spelled, even though the HTTP header is not) tells the browser to only pass along the root URL for the site when navigating. I mentioned this would be the case in any modern browser, and that’s because support for referral policy was only added to browsers starting back in 2016. If I jump over to Internet Explorer and try the same steps, the referer header has a lot more info:
Referer:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiq76HJ1s_xAhWIup4KHcInCfUQFjAFegQIFxAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.duncanmackenzie.net%2Fblog%2Fdocs-overview%2F&usg=AOvVaw3CauyB6Ji_GOgSFFQDqfoC
IE ignores the meta tag telling it to only include the origin, but if you look at that URL you will see it is still missing all the interesting query parameters such as my search terms. This is a special bit of coding done by Google, they know the URL is going to get sent in this case, so when an IE user clicks on a search result, they go through a redirect to clear some of that useful info out of the URL.
Default referral policy
In most browsers, the default policy if the page doesn’t specify one, isstrict-origin-when-cross-origin. This means that if the link is to another origin (so from a page on mycoolwebforum.com to amazon.com, for example) then only the origin of the source site is sent. That is still information and (depending on the site the user is on) it could be sensitive, but it is exposing a lot less than the full URL might. The ‘strict’ part of that policy also covers the specific case where the user is on a secure page (a https link) and navigates to a non-secure page (a http url) in which case no referrer value is passed at all.
Ok, so what does this all mean?
I’d call this the “TL;DR” (too long; didn’t read), except that I put it at the end.
If you are running a site and you want to be the most privacy conscious you can be, add a referrer meta tag value of no-referrer or strict-origin. In the first case, link clicks will never include the source URL, and in the second, links that go outside of the current domain will not include the source. Essentially, doing the second means that you can still use this data to understand user journeys on your site.
As a web developer though, what the main takeaway from all of this is that in most cases you cannot determine the page a user is coming from when they visit your site. You can, in some cases, determine the origin (so you can tell this is traffic from Google, Bing, Twitter, etc.), but not in every case depending on the way the source site is configured.
If you are building a feature that requires you know the source of some incoming traffic, then you should change the incoming URL. Adding a query param of ?traffic_source=<foo.com> would work or you can use campaign IDs (details depend on your analytics, but you’ll have seen examples like WT.mc_id in URLs all over the web) that have the advantage of already being supported by many types of analytics software.
If you have no control over the source page/link, then honestly, you are out of luck. You might pick up some referrer information, from older browsers, but you cannot depend on this to work in most cases.
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