Question

I have two site sitea.com and siteb.com

I need to redirect pages from sitea.com to siteb.com. The redirect script in sitea.com is

<?php
header("Location: http://siteb.com/somepage");
?>

The redirection is taking without any flaw. The functionality if fulfilled. But I have google analytics tracking on siteb.com which should show that the source is referral from sitea.com

I dug into web developer tools in google chrome and found that siteb.com doesn’t send a referral header in the request.

How do i redirect my visitors from sitea.com to siteb.com which sends the referral headers on siteb.com.?

Answer 1

The best way to keep the referal is to issue a standard 301 from the server.

How to do this using .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Doing it straight from PHP should also work (as pointed out by DaveRandom) just be sure to include the HTTP response code.

<?php
// 301 Moved Permanently
header("Location: http://siteb.com/somepage", TRUE, 301);

And bellow a table with data from diferent ways to re-direct and it’s impact on analytics.

Redirect method             | Browser   | Result            | Impact on analytics
----------------------------+-----------+-------------------+--------------------
Meta refresh - 0            | Firefox 3 | Blank referrer    | Lost data
                            | IE8       | Blank referrer    | Lost data
                            | Opera 9   | Internal referrer | Lost data
Javascript:location.href    | Firefox 3 | Internal referrer | Lost data
                            | IE8       | Blank referrer    | Lost data
                            | Opera 9   | Internal referrer | Lost data
Javascript:location.replace | Firefox 3 | Internal referrer | Lost data
                            | IE8       | Blank referrer    | Lost data
                            | Opera 9   | Internal referrer | Lost data
Server-side 301             | Firefox 3 | Original referrer | 
                            | IE8       | Original referrer | 
                            | Opera 9   | Original referrer | 
Server-side 302             | Firefox 3 | Original referrer | 
                            | IE8       | Original referrer | 
                            | Opera 9   | Original referrer | 
Server-side 301 - chained   | Firefox 3 | Original referrer | 
                            | IE8       | Original referrer | 
                            | Opera 9   | Original referrer | 
Server-side 302 - chained   | Firefox 3 | Original referrer | 
                            | IE8       | Original referrer | 
                            | Opera 9   | Original referrer | 

Original link for the above table.