Refback

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A Refback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.

A Refback is simply the usage of the HTTP referer header to discover incoming links. Whenever a browser traverses an incoming link from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor) the browser wil send a Referer header indicating the URL from where the user came. Site B might publish a link to Site A after visiting Site A and extracting relevant information from Site A such as the title, meta information, the link text, and so on.

Refback only requires Site B to be Refback enabled in order to establish this communication. Refback requires Site A to physically link to Site B. Refback also requires browsers to traverse the links.

[edit] Security issues

Referer spam can be used to inject spam links by forging Referer headers.

Refbacks may result in links to private web sites such as web-based e-mail or to dynamic web applications where the Referer header might not refer to a working, publicly accessible URL.

[edit] See also

Linkback, the suite of protocols that allows websites to manually and automatically link to one another.
Pingback, a similar protocol but more difficult as it requires for physical links
Trackback, a similar protocol but more prone to SPAM
Search engine optimization