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"If a website is accessed from a HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connection and a link points to anywhere except another secure location, then the referrer field is not sen
by lstamour 13y ago
"If a website is accessed from a HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connection and a link points to anywhere except another secure location, then the referrer field is not sent." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer whose source is "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1: Encoding Sensitive Information in URI's (RFC 2616 § 15.1.3)". IETF. June 1999. Retrieved 2013-03-20. "Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer[sic] header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol" [1]
Easy fix: Enable SSL everyone, stop "freaking out".
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3
Edit: I see comments further up indicating that Google redirects from SSL to non-SSL, thereby obfuscating the referrer and that this is new. If so, I'll have to take back this statement, sigh.
- dangrossman 13y agoThe search term is not in the referring URL, SSL or not. Google removed it from organic search, by a combination of moving it out of the query string into a URL hash, and by adding a level of redirection between the search result page and the linked website.
- lstamour 13y agoAhh true. Instant did change things, didn't it? I'm still used to omnibars that hide the URL from me on Google searches that I forget it's not all /search?q= any more. Good point, good point. Though, given Google's native apps, perhaps this was inevitable? I mean, there was always a percentage of traffic that would seem organic yet be from Google...