Referrers?

[Fender963]

Soemthing that really has me stumped is under AWStats "Links from an External Page" the like top 8 referrers seem to be directory sites. It's hard to explain but these sites have nothing to do with my topic at all. For example my top referrer so far this month has given me 49000 hits and the address is: http://brothers.flohere.com/sitemap.htm (WARNING: There are porn advertisements on here, which makes this whole thing that much stranger!). MY second top referrer is this: http://technooffice.com/ only when you visit that link i get a custom 404 error page.

Any ideas? The site that is getting these referrals is plantedtank.net

[KLB]

Its called referral spamming. The purpose is to send fake referral information so that it shows up in logs and thus on web stats pages. The purpose is to create back links.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

Its called referral spamming. The purpose is to send fake referral information so that it shows up in logs and thus on web stats pages. The purpose is to create back links.

Surely only works if your stats page is spidered, which begs the queston who would want their stats pages spidered?

[KLB]

Surely only works if your stats page is spidered, which begs the queston who would want their stats pages spidered?

Exactly, but lots of shared hosting sites automatically create stats pages in predictable places so lots of stats pages get indexed with out the site owner's knowledge.

[James]

extreme-dm.com's eXTReMe Tracking is a very popular tracker which is used on many websites, some being very large.

[Fender963]

Wow people really do think of everything.

[Giles]

I use extreme-DM, mostl;y becuase it's search engine tracking is good. I guess the page is crawled...