A refback is one of four types of

linkback A linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to, their articles. The four methods ( refback, trackback, pi ...

s, methods for

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. A Refback is simply the usage of the

HTTP referrer In HTTP, "" (a misspelling of "Referrer") is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI) from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web ...

header to discover incoming links. Whenever a browser traverses an incoming link from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor) the browser will send a referrer value indicating the

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

from where the user came. Site B might publish a link to Site A after visiting Site A and extracting relevant information from Site A such as the title, meta information, the link text, and so on. Refback only requires Site B to be Refback enabled in order to establish this communication. Refback requires Site A to physically link to Site B. Refback also requires browsers to traverse the links. As of March 2021, this will only work if the originator site explicitly sets the referrer policy to ''no-referrer-when-downgrade'' or ''unsafe-url'' either on the whole page using HTTP headers or HTML meta tags or on each individual link pointing to the receptor site . Otherwise, the most popular browsers default to sending only the origin in cross-origin requests, stripping out everything but the domain name in the

HTTP Referrer In HTTP, "" (a misspelling of "Referrer") is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI) from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web ...

header, preventing the refback method from working.

Security issues

If the referred-to site does not validate the referring site URL, it may be subject to referrer spam (due to forged referrer headers) and may end up with links to dynamic web content and private web sites, such as web-based e-mail. Validating the referrer was considered to be a potential

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

vector, but is such a trivial attack that modern web server software has been hardened against this kind of attack.

References

Blogs {{internet-publish-stub

Security issues

See also

References