Saturday, 06 November, 2004
Web traffic reports
The reports I get from SectorLink provide a lot more information than just what search terms are used to access my site. They tell me how many visits I get, from what IP addresses, average hits by day of week and hour of the day, which robots and spiders are accessing the site, which files are the most popular, and what browsers and operating systems are used. Windows is still the dominant OS--about 87% last month. Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser with 70% share, but that's been decreasing as both Firefox and Netscape climb.
The reports also list links from other sites--browsers pass this information along when somebody clicks on a link. I've recently egun to get a lot of referrals from some strange places like cashblaster.biz, riskfreegains.biz, and best-prom.com (just to list a few). I've checked those sites and haven't found a link from them to my site, which leads me to believe that somebody's playing games with the referral URL.
Has anybody else seen this kind of thing with their sites' traffic reports? Are they hoping I'll link to them because they supposedly link to me? What gives?