Trackback and External Referrers
Trackback
When Trackback is enabled, any time you link to an external webpage that supports Trackback Autodiscovery, Confluence will send a trackback ping to that page to inform it that it has been linked to.
Confluence pages also support Trackback Autodiscovery and when Trackback is enabled, can receive trackback pings from other sites.
On this page:
To enable trackback:
- Go to
> General Configuration > Further Configuration - Choose Edit
- Select the Trackback checkbox then Save
External referrers
An external referrer is any site that links to your Confluence instance. Each time someone clicks on the external link, your Confluence site can record the click as a referral.
By default, external referrers for a page are listed under 'Hot Referrers' on the 'Info' screen of the page. Confluence shows a maximum of 10 referrers. If there are more than 10, confluence shows the 10 with the highest number of hits.
Note that you do not need to enable trackback in order to have external referrers enabled.
Screenshot: hot referrers on the page information screen.
Excluding external referrers
Confluence Administrators can exclude external referrers to prevent them from being recorded or displayed anywhere on your site. Once you have specified your list of blocked URLs, any incoming links from URLs that match the list will no longer be recorded.
Referrer URLs are blocked if they start with any of the URLs in the exclusion list. So http://evilspamsite.blogspot.com will also match http://evilspamsite.blogspot.com/nastypage.html
You might want to do this if:
- You're running a Confluence installation that is open to public
In a site that is open to public, one unfortunate problem is that malicious sites can spam the display of a page's incoming links statistics. This is usually done to get the site's URL to appear in the sidebar. By adding these sites to the 'excluded referrers' list, you can prevent them from being listed on your site. - Confluence is installed on a server with multiple domain names or IP addresses
Confluence will consider any URL originating from the domain name where Confluence is installed as an internal link. However, if Confluence is installed on a server with multiple domain names or IP addresses, you will need to add the other domain name prefixes to this list to let Confluence know that any links from these domains should not be considered external links.
To add a URL to the excluded referrers list:
- Go to > General Configuration > Manage Referrers
- Enter the URL in the Referrer URL Prefix field (you must include http://)
- Choose Add
You can add multiple URLs to the list.
Hiding external referrers
By default, Confluence lists the external referrers as 'Hot Referrers' on the page information screen for a page. If you turn this option off, external referrers will not be listed on the page.
To hide external referrers:
- Go to > General Configuration > Manage Referrers.
- Deselect Show Referrers in Page Info.
Screenshot: Managing external referrers
Ignoring external referrers
An external referrer is any site that links to your Confluence instance. Each time someone clicks on the external link, your Confluence site can record the click as a referral. By default, Confluence records the number of hits made to a page from any link on an external site. If you turn this option off, Confluence will not record the hits.
To ignore external referrers:
- Go to > General Configuration > Manage Referrers
- Deselect Record External Referrers
Screenshot: Managing external referrers
