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.

You 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

There are two instances where you may want to do this:

  1. If you are 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.
  2. If 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.

(info) You need to be a Confluence administrator and to know the URL of the site to add it to the excluded referrers list.

To add a URL to the excluded referrers list:

  1. Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
  2. Choose Manage Referrers
  3. Enter the URL in the Referrer URL Prefix field (you must include http://)
  4. Choose Add.

You can add multiple URLs to the list.

 

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