Ask HN: What's “?ref=https://codemonkey.link”?

4 points

3 years ago

I've recently noticed that GoogleBot (Google's webcrawler) has occasionally requested the URI "/?ref=https://codemonkey.link" on one of my sites (which doesn't respond to GET params at all, it's a static site), and I can't work out what this is or why GoogleBot would be doing it.

It's definitely a GoogleBot machine making this request (I validated the IP), and searching Google itself for that string (and subsets of it) provides several URIs of sites which are to some extent "using" it (although it could just be GoogleBot doing the same thing as it did for my site, which would ignore the GET request completely, and just return the same results as for /), and searching Github for it:

https://github.com/search?q=codemonkey.link&type=code

Shows URIs like: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-46493-0_37?ref=https://codemonkey.link

using it, so while it's not common, there are other things occasionally using it by the looks of things. Whois of the domain seems to show it's registered in China, and several of the links in the Github query above seem to be Chinese.

Is it a "standard" for something? I can't work out what it is with queries to DDG, Kagi or Google, or why GoogleBot would be adding a URI of a Chinese site to a request it makes to my site, unless it got this link from another website/search engine which crawled it and that site created a "fake" GET param for "tracking"/fingerprinting purposes?

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