Mock the CGI.HTTP_REFERER using Coldfusion

Question

I am trying to write some search engine optimized code for a Coldfusion project, and one thing I am trying to accomplish in that is changing a few page variables when the page is referred from different search engines.

Does anyone know if there is a way, or if it's even possible to mock the CGI.HTTP_REFERER to Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc??

See this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/616980/how-do-you-spoof-http-referer — orangepips, Jan 12 '11 at 20:52

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 14 '15 at 15:16

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Refactor your method, instead of using CGI scope directly, use an argument, e.g.:

<cfargument name="cgiScope" type="struct" default="#CGI#" require="false">

Done. :)

edited Oct 14 '15 at 15:16

David Faber

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answered Jan 12 '11 at 21:50

Henry

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 12 '11 at 20:50

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It is frowned upon to show different kind of content for search engine bots. Either way, it is not possible to change the CGI.HTTP_REFERER with Coldfusion. Your best bet is to edit your "hosts" file and add an entry to point google.com to the IP of your server (eg. 127.0.0.1) and set up a page with a link to your site to fake the request as coming from Google/Bing/Yahoo.

answered Jan 12 '11 at 20:50

eapen

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Since spiders typically don't report the referrer, this likely would not affect them anyway. – Ben Doom Jan 12 '11 at 21:13

orangepips · Answer 3 · 2011-01-12T21:18:27.907

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The value of the CGI scope is large in part determined by what's sent in a request's headers. The referer in particular is easily spoofed. See the following:

Ben Nadel explains how to with CFHTTP and CFHTTPPARAM to spoof the referer.
Firefox Plugin Modify Headers (my comment points an answer with this).

edited Jan 12 '11 at 21:18

answered Jan 12 '11 at 20:55

orangepips

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 15 '11 at 23:01

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I would make a function getHttpReferer that normally returns CGI.HTTP_REFERER, however when you unit test you can mock out that function to return whatever you want.

answered Jan 15 '11 at 23:01

Aaron Silverman

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Mock the CGI.HTTP_REFERER using Coldfusion

4 Answers4