Redirect using htaccess based on referrer

Question

We only want users from a specific website to use our services. Is there a way to redirect all traffic that does not come from a specific referrer, to a website of our choosing, via htaccess?

Also, this is for the first page only. So if they get to our site, they're going to browse a new page, and their referrer for the new page would apparently be the site they are already on.

Thank you!

Solution 1

Try adding this in the htaccess file in your document root:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://the-ok-domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?first-page.html$ http://the-website-of-your-choosing.com/ [L,R]

You could also make it so you add your own domain to the referer check:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://the-ok-domain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://your-domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://the-website-of-your-choosing.com/ [L,R]

Then you can include all of your pages in the check.

Note that referers can be easily forged and any htaccess file using mod_rewrite in any of your subdirectories will supercede these rules (unless those htaccess files have the RewriteOptions inheret option set)

Solution 2

Didn't work for me, I've made this small change to redirect traffic from google:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.*)\.google\.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.my-site.it/$1 [L,R]