What Is Referrer?

Why It Matters

The referrer tells destination sites where traffic is coming from. For domain forwarding, this matters for analytics — the destination site sees where the redirected visitor originated.

How the Referrer Works in Redirects

1. Visitor on social-media.com clicks link to old-domain.com
   Referer: social-media.com/post

2. old-domain.com 301 redirects to new-domain.com
   Referer: old-domain.com/  (updated by browser)

3. new-domain.com receives the request
   Sees referrer as: old-domain.com (not the original social media link)

The original referrer (social-media.com) is typically lost after the redirect. The destination sees the forwarding domain as the referrer.

Referrer Policies

Policy	Sends Referrer?	Cross-Origin?
no-referrer	Never	N/A
origin	Domain only (no path)	Yes
strict-origin	Domain only, HTTPS→HTTPS	Yes
no-referrer-when-downgrade	Yes, except HTTPS→HTTP	Default

Referrer and Analytics

Since the original referrer may be lost during forwarding, use UTM parameters to track traffic sources reliably:

https://old-domain.com/page?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
  → 301 → https://new-domain.com/page?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

UTM parameters survive redirects (they’re part of the query string), making them more reliable than referrer headers for attribution.

Domain Forward’s redirect analytics captures traffic data at the forwarding point — before any referrer information is modified.