PHP: Changing referer with header()

Question

My CMS links to other sites for convenience and I\'d like to hide the referer so that other sites don\'t see the directory and the query string of my CMS. I now have the CMS

Answer 1

The Referer header is something the browser sends to the Server. You are changing the respose from the server to the browser, so that will not work this way (unlike the Cookie header). As far as I know you have no server-side control of the browser's behavior on sending the Referer.

Answer 2

The browser does get to choose what referrer to send, but there are ways around it.

HTML5 added meta referrer, most modern browsers will respect it. Just add

<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer">

to your site's head.

There's also redirection services and other hacks to hide the ref (https redirects, iframe tricks and others).

Answer 3

You cannot really change the referer from server-side as it is provided by the browser to the server.

But you can use a service like href.li, just use

 https://href.li/?http://<your-url>

Note: http:// after ? is important or it will not redirect.