Linkly and VPN Traffic
While Linkly links work with VPN traffic, in general, Linkly cannot support geo-redirection and geo-lookups for VPN traffic.
The reason is because VPNs deliberately obfuscate the traffic source.
How VPNs Work
VPN's work by bouncing your traffic through a server in another country. The idea is to mask the original physical location of your request.
High quality VPNs will use retail internet connections from the target country to route traffic through, so traffic looks organic.
Poor quality VPNs will use server datacenters such as AWS to re-route traffic.
This is cheaper, but the traffic doesn't look natural, as it is coming from a datacenter, rather than the sort of internet connection someone has at home or at work.
How Geolocation works
Each internet service provider (ISP) is allocated a range of IP addresses on the internet, much like a phone company might have a range of phone numbers.
Linkly looks up user's IP addresses in publicly available databases of ISPs, and matches the ISP to the ISP's country.
How VPN traffic affects Linkly
- The 'Country' tab on Traffic reports is unlikely to be accurate.
- Georedirection is unlikely to work reliably.
- For users using cheap VPNs that use datacenters, enabling 'block robots' is likely to result in those users being blocked.
- ISP lookup will not show the user's real ISP.
