When your site is on HTTPS and you are linking or redirecting to a HTTP site, the browser will not send a referrer.
This means the target site will see your traffic as "direct traffic", i.e. they cannot distinguish such hits from a user who directly typed in the URL.

Reasons for this behavior

It's probably because of this RFC Show archive.org snapshot :

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol.

It's not clear why this SHOULD exists. One might think it's because of session IDs encoded in the URL (something that was in fashion in the 90s), but then again browsers do send referers when linking from HTTPS to HTTPS.

Fixes

Tunnel links through a non-HTTPS page (but test the effect because HTTP referers survive a 301 redirect)
There's a new <META> tag Show archive.org snapshot you can use in some modern browsers.

Henning Koch

makandra.com

Say thanks27

Last edit

Almost 7 years ago

Keywords

ssl, referer

License

Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.

Async control flow in JavaScript: Promises, Microtasks, async/await

Slides for Henning's talk on Sep 21st 2017.

Understanding sync vs. async control flow

Talking to synchronous (or "blocking") API

print('script start')
html = get('/foo')
print(html)
print('s...

Delivering Carrierwave attachments to authorized users only

Preparation

To attach files to your records, you will need a new database column representing the filename of the file. To do this, add a new migration (rails g migration <name>) with the following content:

class AddAttachmentToNotes...

Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2013-05-06 15:00)

Browsers will not send a referrer when linking from HTTPS to HTTP

Reasons for this behavior

Fixes

Related cards:

Understanding sync vs. async control flow

Talking to synchronous (or "blocking") API

Preparation

Summary

Introduction