How to remove referrals from your URLs

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We talk about a very interesting topic even if we know the title how to eliminate referrals from your URLs it is unappetizing and clickbait and does not fully enhance the topic we are going to talk about. The idea came to us while reading an interesting post by DebianMan on the our group on Telegram.

As always, let's start with the basics. What are referrals in URLs? They are little pieces written inside the URLs we visit that contain information that is not necessary for navigation but only serves to let someone know where we came from. Explained better and faster with a practical example with Amazon, which is one of the most used and well-known sites in Italy (the links will deliberately not be clickable, they are used only to give an example):

• This is generally the URL that you find at the top of your address bar and if you decide to share it with someone you are passing it to the other person and above all to Amazon some information not necessary for navigation:

https://www.amazon.it/montagne-legno-grigio-stile-scandinavo/dp/B07SK8TWKL/?encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=JpBHC&pf_rd_p=25a7e7d4-57d6-42a3-ab94-7458d8a91cb8&pf_rd_r=K6SFZJPPJCW8JVGX3 1KG&pd_rd_r=61d79f8e-8e1a-45b9-8b62 -8bcb072a09d8&pd_rd_wg=ivGsC&ref=pd_gw_unk

• This below is the cleaned URL. As you can see it is much shorter but the end result is the same. The linked page is in fact the same, except that in this case we are not talking about ad Amazon from where we have arrived: https://www.amazon.it/montagne-legno-grigio-stile-scandinavo/dp/B07SK8TWKL/

How to remove referrals from your URLs

The same happens for example with Google. Go up Google with a Browsers that it is not Brave or Firefox and search for any word, such as apple. As you can see the URL displayed seems simple such as it.wikipedia.org > wiki > Apple. If you right-click and copy the link, however, you'll notice that the URL actually looks like this:

https://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjEzM7Cx6_tAhWQHhQKHeqSCs4QFjABegQIAxAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fit.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMela&usg=AOvVaw1g_FpMI1m32K6fRxSqWpDo

All that ambaradan is not necessary for navigation purposes as by clicking on it you will simply end up on the page https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mela. This is one thing that alternatives to Google Search that we generally offer you they don't.

Referrals on Twitter

The referrals then follow us throughout the web, sometimes they are also written in clear text they reveal how did we get to that link. Very stupid and banal example. If we're up Twitter and we click on a hashtag the URL at the top will say it will be something like https://twitter.com/hashtag/alternative?src=hashtag_click. The part after the question mark is not necessary to reach and see all the tags 1TP13Alternatives but identifies us as: “you got here because you clicked on the hashtag 1TP13Alternatives” (src=hashtag_click it means exactly that).

Now, we understand that this is not all easily understandable nor particularly dangerous. They are widely used methods to understand where people come from. However, when we forward the link to someone, in forums, groups or among friends, it would generally be best to eliminate all parts with referrals.

It is not entirely easy to understand what needs to be removed without minimal technical knowledge. Referrals tend to be the whole part after the question mark within a URL. Other times they are followed by &. But it is not a fixed rule and sometimes taking away a question mark or one & the URL may break the link to the site. You need minimal familiarity with the concepts of URLs, domains and referrals.

How to remove referrals from your URLs? With ClearURLs!

A simple and very effective method to automatically remove referrals from your URLs is to use the for extension Firefox and for Brave/Chrome call ClearURLs, an extension Open source ¹. Thanks to ClearURLs in fact referrals will be automatically deleted from most sites. You won't have to do anything, browsing normally you will see your URLs magically shorten and from now on you can share everything without filling the web with tracers and referrals!

And for Android?

There are also applications for Android that allow you to remove referrals from URLs, here are some:

• URLCheck, excellent and very complete and available both on the Play Store what up F-Droid;

• URLSanitizer, available only on F-Droid;

• Unalix, this too is very simple and only available on F-Droid.

All these latest applications are very similar and all work more or less in the same way. Try them and see which one is best for you.

1. ClearURLs on GitHub[↩]

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