Topic awaiting preservation: How does the referrer header work?

I work for a link exchange site and am having problem getting the correct referrer information showing up.

The client can place ads on their site via javascript. The javascript creates an iframe that loads a page of links from the link exchange site.

The links that are loaded reference the link exchange site, and then redirect via a PHP header to the correct page.

It appears that the referrer information shows up correctly as coming from the link exchange site sometimes, but more often than not the referrer information is not being passed.

Does anyone know why this is happenning? and next how it could be corrected so that the link exchange site is being correctly referenced as the referrer?

It turns out that the clients of the link exchange really want to see the referrer information so they can double check their numbers against those that the link exchange is telling them.

Dan
Code Town | Zombie Head | How Much TP? | Feed The Blob

The referrer field is optional and can even be disabled in many web browsers as a privacy option. It should not be relied upon for anything more than casual statistical analysis, IMHO.

That is what we are using it for. The clients are running stats against the ones that we supply.

It was IE that was not reporting the statistics for the referrer. This was caused by the redirect happenning via Javascript on the page load.

Changing this to a header("locations: ...."); call resulted in IE sending the referrer by default.

Dan
Code Town | Zombie Head | How Much TP? | Feed The Blob