Chameleon landing page
If you are into black/gray hat marketing you will eventually end up with your affiliate manager giving your a lot of hassle. Even if you hide the referrer eventually you will be contacted and asked to provide more details about your sources of traffic. This chameleon landing page can be a real life saver! Let me tell you how it works before I go into code.
You will end up with a legitimate whitehat landing page that will act like any other page. It will even get indexed by search engines like a regular website. However if you were to send traffic to it from a particular unique url it will turn into your blackhat page. For example have a look at this quick chameleon page I set up on http://www.exposedseo.com/tests/test.php It will look whitehat to every human and spider until you come from this page http://www.exposedseo.com/tests/blackhat.php
Lets setup the chameleon page first.
< ?php
$referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if($referer == "http://www.yourredirectpage.com")
{
echo "
Here you will need to copy and paste your blackhat landingpage source code. Keep in mind that you will need to swap all " for ' in your code.
";
}
else
{
echo "
Now you need to copy and paste your whitehat source code here.
";
}
?>
Now you need to setup your redirect page. (Without spaces after < )
< body onload="javascript:frmForcedReferrer.submit();">
< form action="http://www.yourchameleonpage.com" method="post" name="frmForcedReferrer">
< /form>
You are done!
Send all your blackhat traffic to your redirect page which will then get redirected to your chameleon landing page. When your affiliate manager or anyone else comes to see where the traffic is coming from they will see the whitehat side of your landing page. Enjoy!
February 9th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
how can i run this script with more than one referrer….?
February 9th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Use something like this:
if($referer == ‘http://www.first referrer.com’ || $referer == ‘http://www.secondreferrer.com/whatever.php’ || $referer == ‘http://www.thirdreferrer.com’)
And so on, just follow the pattern.
February 10th, 2009 at 5:30 am
Thanks Ilia for your quick reply, is there any way to call all links from simple text file because its easy to edit one file rather than edit several pages.
February 10th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I think its doable but I’m not really a programmer. I just learn the bits of code that I need to accomplish a particular task. The rest I have no knowledge of. I had a quick look around and could not find anything. You are better off asking a programmer how to pull multiple if conditions/variables from a text file.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:58 am
Hi Ilia! And thanks for your blog! A fun read for an SEO novice like me.
I must confess that I have some trouble understanding this one though. Do you have a certain model in mind ? I can’t think of a scheme where this tip could work.
For example, let’s say one of your site (site A), receiving a lot of traffic thanks to blackhat methods, redirects to your site B. The blackhat face of this site B could be a cookie stuffing landing page, and the whitehat face a simple page with some affiliate links. This way, your site B would always be the referer of your affiliates. But then both your sites could be reported by a competitor if he finds out that A is redirecting to B. And a returning visitor bookmarking the site B wouldn’t find the same information on it. So what’s the point ? Deal with me, I’m new to all this stuff.
A small question : if A redirects to B with a 301 permanent redir., isn’t its “juice” transferred and doesn’t it get de-indexed? Now, what’s the point if people can’t find A in SERP anymore?
Sorry if this seems trivial to you.
Maybe you thought about another model. Could you share? Thanks.
In the meanwhile, I’ll read the rest of your blog until I reach the first article.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I think you misunderstood the idea.
Everything happens on the same page. There is only one page for example whatever.php. This page then changes depending on where the traffic is coming from. Your affiliate will see that the traffic is coming from whatever.php but it will look absolutely normal to them. Only the traffic coming from redirect.php (Which redirects to whatever.php) you are promoting will see it as a blackhat page. All the juice will stay one one page (Whatever.php) and there will be no need to redirect anything. Hope this clears things out for you.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Oh ! I see !
Well, then :
1) you should add a manual link, for js disabled users (not a redirect/meta refresh, or the referrer won’t be set)
2) you should add NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, etc. to redirect.php (No juice, but you don’t want your backlinks to be traceable.)
There’s still a leak : redirect.php will show up in Yahoo & MSN SERP (even with NOINDEX). You could check if they are the referrers in redirect.php, but then you could be traced with an access to redirect.php without referrer. You could only allow a list of referrers to redirect.php., but the backlinks to redirect.php are traceable anyway, and could be used as an entry point. Yahoo & MSN aren’t our friends.
Yeah, I thought about it yesterday.
See you.
March 6th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Yea, obviously nothing is perfect and there are some other ways to go around these problems that involve scanning the IP ranges etc. however I did not want to get into this because some people would lose me completely.
July 19th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Thats interesting idea actually. With some tweaking might be really safe
July 20th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Awesome stuff dude.
I’ve been ketching it over at BHW
August 5th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I messaged you on BHW.. had a question about this for you..
thanks…
Mark.
September 21st, 2009 at 6:02 am
Thanks for this great script!
Is it possible to load php with it?
I tried to load my WordPress blog as white hat site, but it doesn’t work.
What do I have to do to load the blog or php in general with your script?
Thanks,
Stephan
September 27th, 2010 at 2:50 am
I like the thinking behind this. If people are really all that worried about their AM contacting their page, just flip the script. Most of us know where our traffic is coming from, and usually not big G. Most AMs are not stupid either, they know how to use a proxy to check you out. This is a lot better than trying to guess the IP of your AM or where they come from. Kudos