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Okay, so I have websites and Wordpress blogs that link to a lot of useful sites - like professor webpages and other wordpress blogs. However, I don't want them to know of my sites or wordpress blogs. Is there a way to prevent them from being able to see them if they check the incoming links of their site? Would robots.txt work?

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Oh, I just thought of an idea. Would putting the link through bit.ly or tinyURL work? – InquilineKea Feb 12 '11 at 8:05
yes, using a URL shortener should do the trick. Keep in mind that for some URL shorteners though, such as goo.gl, anybody can see statistics for a shortened URL, which may include referrer information. – nhinkle♦ Feb 12 '11 at 21:49
The HTTP-Referer field is set and transmitted by the browser. robots.txt is for browser or cralwer consumption, but compliance with it is voluntary and robots.txt makes no provision for telling a browser not to transmit the HTTP-Referer header. Even if that was possible, it's a bad idea to rely on that as you're depending on the browser to obey that, but there's no way you can really force it to. – ultrasawblade Mar 22 '11 at 19:52

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No, you'd have to use an anonymizer such as anonym.to.

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Oh, how does that differ from a place like bit.ly or tinyURL? – InquilineKea Feb 12 '11 at 8:07
URL shorteners are in the market of shortening the URL; http://www.example.com/wow/this/is/a/long/url?isnt#it shortens to, say, http://bit.ly/123. Anonymizers are only there to sit in the middle; the resultant would be similar to http://anonym.to/?http://www.example.com/wow/this/is/a/long/url%3fisnt%23it. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Feb 12 '11 at 8:27
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Ghostery: http://www.ghostery.com/download is a great solution for blocking all or just some tracking scripts on the web. It's highly configurable. I've not tested it out as I heard about it yesterday but it seems to do what you'd like.

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How does this help the person that runs the website? – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Mar 22 '11 at 20:20
I'm sorry. I misread. The only way to block people from getting to your sites or blogs would be to block the people you don't want via IP range using .htaccess – peroty Mar 22 '11 at 20:26

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