Fake your Referrer Header for Instant Traffic

Saw an awesome post today that’s so simple it’s ingenious. Who ever said things had to be complicated?

Your referrer header is what will appear in a webmasters logs whenever you visit their site. So if only you could manipulate this value somehow….

It’s simple, simply fake your referrer header so that any site you visit will see the referrer as your website. I’m sure you’re thinking what is this good for? Well a number of reasons:

• Freaking People Out (i.e. setting your referrer as kinkybumsex.com :p)
• Making people think you’ve linked to them (but you really haven’t ;))
• Getting people to visit your site because they see it in your logs

Now, being a typical webmaster I’m not going to throw up the opportunity to miss out on free web traffic. However, setting my referrer as this blog would probably give the game away since this post is at the #1 spot.So how’s it done?

Download Privoxy, this is a local proxy that you can use to run your web browsers through. It’ll also do cool stuff like block ads, cookies & popups.

Here’s a photo of the settings you should have (Taken from Bjornblog):

Make sure your settings look like they do above, however change the add-header line to whatever your website is. Voilà !