Crazy referrers

[Bernard]

Looking over my (interplansystems.com) logs for the last week and I noticed two anomalies: www.netcraft.com/survey/ - referred 7 visitors last week over the span of 3 days. There are no links to my site that I can find. Anyone know what this is? www.iaea.org - referred 8 visitors in one day. I could not find any links to my site. I'm aware that some version of IE erroneously lists the last visited site as a referrer even if it is not, but 8 visits from this site's home page seem a bit of a stretch for that explanation. :confused: Any ideas?I'm using Urchin and these sites were listed as referrers.

[ihelpyou]

hmm. That second one redirected me to this page after about 3 seconds:
http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/

strange

Here is another possibility. Understand that overture is partnering with gator.com. If your site is an advertiser, it's very possible visitors to both those sites had the gator scumware installed on their puters. Once they visited those sites, a popup from gator appeared with overture ads in it. Your's was one of those ads. The visitor clicked on your ad and was taken to your site. In that case, your stats would certainly register a visit from those sites.

I'm not real sure about the above as I won't deal with overture because of that relationship, but it seems a possibility. Of course, if you don't have an ad on overture, then it's not possible.

[Bernard]

Thanks for the feedback Doug. I'm only advertising with AdWords right now, so I would be surprised if it was a scumware issue.

[qwerty]

I used to see a hit now and then from the IAEA on the site I ran for my old company. I never figured out why.

I believe the hits from the netcraft survey is someone checking to see what kind of server hosts your site. If you go to netcraft.com, you'll see a search box in the top-left corner of the page. Running it for your site gets this result (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=interplansystems.com).

[altyfc]

I have been noticing a lot of odd referrers over the last few months. Gambling sites, I think one of the aforementioned, and others...

When I've been to have a look, there's also no sign of a link to us, and we don't do any kind of AdWords or any other advertising.

I am wondering if these people are running something automated, in order to get their domain to show in our logs. If they have a computer sitting doing nothing, could they not give it some automated tasks such as "load our site, and then make the browser go here" and do the same thing time and time again, for multiple different domains. Products such as Automate could aid with this.

If this is what they are doing, would their domain show up as a referrer, and is this a plausible explanation?

[JuniorHarris]

As qwerty mentioned, somebody no doubt ran the Netcraft survey...

iaea has been sending "referrals" for a few years, other then that I don't know much about them. But it is obvious that the referrer string is FED automatically, and that alone is worth denying requests. Obviously they don't have a link to that page on iaea.

And it seems as if everybody and their brother is trying to leave skid marks in the log files. Some simply trying to generate extra traffic (and links from web stat analyzers) and others who appear to be using some sort of click/traffic generator (most likely to bleed PPC).

[Hope]

Originally posted by Bernard
www.netcraft.com/survey/ - referred 7 visitors last week over the span of 3 days. There are no links to my site that I can find. Anyone know what this is


This one is around a lot. It think this is a bot. One thing I have noticed about this is when this shows in my logs, I also find a large number of attemps to access my email servers. At the top of this page (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph) you will see a box. You can submit a domain and it will tell you about the servers the domain is hosted on.

Take a look at your logs for two weeks after you see this around. Take close notice of your 404 errors. You might find people trying to access your email scripts and your email servers.

I have also found, that now that my domain has been entered into their database of sites, it tends to get regular visits. It will visit about once every couple of months.

[qwerty]

The information provided by NetCraft can certainly be useful to hackers, but I don't blame NetCraft for that. It is true that after one of my sites gets hit by NC's bot I get a few users trying to hack into the server.

I believe the return of the bot only goes on for a few months, unless someone else does a check on your server. When that happens, the bot schedules a few more visits. So I find that it visits 3 or 4 times, then it may be gone for months, and then it starts up again.

[Bernard]

Does anyone know if the netcraft bot respect robots.txt?