Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

One tip for not getting into trouble is to not use SSL on the site you are sending traffic from (or use a referrer policy meta tag so that the browser is authorized to pass the referrer from your SSL page). SSL results in blank referrers by default. A friend had his Amazon account banned and earnings confiscated because his traffic had blank referrers.

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This is not correct. SSL only blanks referrals to non-HTTPS links, the referrer is passed by default to all HTTPS links.

Since HN is using HTTPS, this should be very easy to test by just clicking on this link: https://www.whatismyreferer.com/

Note that HN includes this line of HTML which affects the sent Referrer header:

    <meta name="referrer" content="origin">

Interesting! Any idea why HN sets the referrer to origin?

The HackerNews repo is gone (and thus the issue), but at one point this was a Github issue I successfully filed to get HN to add it so their referral data for non-SSL pages wouldn't be lost:

https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/68

(Background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7197520)

IIRC, I think the developer was open to adding a referral, but not have it leak any on-site information, so this was a compromise.

On OSX/safari, if I click on the link, it correctly says the referrer is YC News.

if I right click the link (which I often do) and open in new tab or window, I see:

No referer / hidden

In these cases it does not alleviate the issue flagged above.

iOs/ chrome shows the correct referrer in both cases.

I'll have to ask my friend about this...he was using SSL and had no referrers and they killed his account. He had no referrer policy tag. I know he was using a tracking script that he redirected traffic through as well, perhaps that was Http.

I am a long-term affiliate with amazon and when I switched to https I didn't experience any problems at all.

With other affiliate networks I absolutely did have problems though - because of the issue described above.

I assumed the difference was amazon's use of a referral tag at the end of every url?

I just signed up for LetsEncrypt and didn't give referer a second thought. Thanks for the tip!

How does this work WRT amazon referrals on reddit and such?

Most subreddits don't allow Amazon referral links.

But gamedeals allows certain whitelisted ones (charity) and AFAIK there has been no problem.

Good point, although I suspect Amazon is more lenient with known charity referrals.

Most major sites these days have a referrer policy tag in their HTML that allows at least the domain of the site to flow through. But I think they also ban accounts for posting direct Amazon affiliate links on places like Reddit anyway. Amazon is similar to Adsense in its propensity to ban and confiscate earnings without legitimate reason, and sometimes without explanation. Personally, I wouldn't waste time or money sending traffic to them. It's like building a house on quicksand. CPA networks are far more reliable if you want to be an affiliate marketer.

Could you give some examples of CPA networks (and for that matter what CPA stands for)? I have zero knowledge of this.

Cost Per Action. Google it, there are many. MaxBounty, CJ.com, linkshare, etc.

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