web referral phenomena

[george]

sometimes i see in my web log referrals from pages that don't actually link to my website, like a news article, or another software companies website. do you guys get that too?

i'm assuming that it is the page the user was on before they went to my page, and they have some sort of plugin or adware in their browser that puts the current page they are viewing as the referrel page when they go to a new address...

anyone know what's going on here?

[Sillysoft]

There has started to be some 'referrer spam' coming around the net. Some ass*&%$ companies are advertising themselves by sending hits along with their URL as the referrer to random sites. This might not account for all of your mystery referrers, but I know that I get some of this stuff. I even get some from a site (and their affiliates) that sells a tool to send out referrer spam. :mad: :mad: :mad: That's how I became sure that this was happening. And it explained some mystery referrers I was getting from some porn sites.

[Diodor Bitan]

Do these companies gain anything else except some visibility from the webmasters?

[oNyx]

Do these companies gain anything else except some visibility from the webmasters?

No.

Unless there is a public stats page, which gets accidently crawled by search engine bots (effectively making your page a link farm for some random ****ers).

[Ryan Clark]

Yes, if you have a public stats page, and someone has found that it is indexed in Google, then I can see why they'd try to falsify referrer information.

But you might consider an alternate explanation: What if users have bookmarked your website, and are using the bookmark to travel from unrelated websites to your website? The referrer would seem to be random, but would not be the result of spam or fraud.

[Sillysoft]

I don't think that web browsers send a referrer with the request if it's a from a bookmark. Same as if they type the URL in themselves.

[Gmicek]

We've been getting this sort of spam in our logs for the better part of a year and it has almost always been for web master related things. Hosting services, admin tools, banner ad campaigns, and so on. I can see the perceived value in that. But for the past week we've been getting hammered from sites at the gb.com domain, stuff like free_viagra-refills-for-U.gb.com. Whats wierd is that half the time when I followed the links to see what was up they didn't work.

I think the reason they do it is because it's really easy for them to do so, it doesn't take much effort to have a spider troll thousands upon thousands of sites and give a fake-O referrer.

[Chris Evans]

A couple of months ago, I got about 15-20 referrals from Hamumu's site (www.hamumu.com) just out of the blue. My web logs say they came from the front page no less. I know Hamumu wouldn't link to me, especially on the front page so I have no idea what happened. :)

[Ryan Clark]

A couple of months ago, I got about 15-20 referrals from Hamumu's site (www.hamumu.com) just out of the blue. My web logs say they came from the front page no less. I know Hamumu wouldn't link to me, especially on the front page so I have no idea what happened. :)That's precisely the sort of thing I've seen in my web logs... referrals from websites that have no link to me, and yet are in the same vein as my sites. The referring websites aren't commercial, so they'd have no interest in spamming me, so the conclusion I draw is that some web browsers MUST count the previous website as a referrer even when the user employs a bookmark, or enters the URL by hand.

Unless I'm missing something?

[Armsfeld]

some web browsers MUST count the previous website as a referrer even when the user employs a bookmark, or enters the URL by hand.

Internet Explorer and Opera both had this problem at some point, probably others. I hear this bug is common because it's common to misspell "referrer."

[ErikH2000]

sometimes i see in my web log referrals from pages that don't actually link to my website, like a news article, or another software companies website. do you guys get that too?
Yes. Another thought, since you mention news articles:

If you have forum software on your site with smilies, people running forum software from elsewhere will add your smilies to their software keeping the images hosted on your server. It sounds really dumb, but I had half a dozen sites leeching my smilies. I didn't mind the bandwidth loss so much as having my referral log filled with useless information. My system admin figured out how to disable this type of external linking in Apache and now the problem seems to have gone away. It seems like a good idea to disable the external linking as a general solution to other situations like this.

My most perplexing web stats problem of all time is why the #1 search term bringing people to my site is "kittens". TIP: If anybody is ready to sell out and just wants to start stacking up the cash, make a game about kittens.

-Erik