1.8 Referring Documents

The Referer header indicates which document referred to the one currently specified in this request. This helps the server keep track of documents that refer to malformed or missing locations on the server.

For example, if the client opens a connection to www.ora.com at port 80 and sends:

GET /contact.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.ora.com

The server may respond with:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 02:22:47 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 17:18:22 GMT
ETag: "134e8-b2a-38d3ba5e"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 2858
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html

<h1>Contact Information</h1>
<a href="http://sales.ora.com/sales.html"> Sales Department</a>

The user clicks on the hyperlink and the client requests sales.html from sales.ora.com, specifying that it was sent there from the /contact.html document on www.ora.com:

GET /sales.html HTTP/1.1
Host: sales.ora.com
Referer: http://www.ora.com/contact.html