Wrong referrer links?

jfriend · June 7, 2010

I've been looking at my referrer stats for the last week or so and there are a number of referrers listed that simply don't have any of my images in them. As best I can tell, this must be some sort of problem with the referrer recording.

The #4 source of referrers is the site: newschoolofphotography.com. When I click on the number to see the actual links, there are many different pages. I can't find any of the pages listed that have any of my images in them. Here are some examples that are listed as specific referring pages:

http://newschoolofphotography.com/general-discussion/24581-big-picture-disaster-unfolds-slowly-gulf-mexico.html

http://newschoolofphotography.com/critique/24545-first-use-strobes.html

http://newschoolofphotography.com/sharing/24510-science-art.html

All claim to have hits on my images, but I can't find anything related to my images in any of those pages. Same goes for some of the other sites listed as referrers. There are some legit referrers so it's not completely busted, but there seem to be plenty of phantom referrers.

Can anyone at Smugmug explain this or look into it?

b7j0c · June 7, 2010

hi John, this is brad, the stats engineer

while i don't have any particular experience with that site, i can speculate as to why you may not be able to find your images on the referring link

1. the images may be linked in to private messages or some other content that a user on that site might see when logged in

2. the original link may have been expired or deleted

3. the referring link is missing an essential bit. if a url is of the form

http://HOST/PATH/PAGE#ANCHOR

the #ANCHOR part is not carried forward into the referring information. in this case it might be required to see precisely where the photo is linked from

4. the photo may be getting retrieved but not displayed

i know that isn't conclusive, but without knowing more about that site, i'm not sure what to tell you

as always, feel free to email me (brad@smugmug.com), if you need anything

brad

jfriend wrote: »

I've been looking at my referrer stats for the last week or so and there are a number of referrers listed that simply don't have any of my images in them. As best I can tell, this must be some sort of problem with the referrer recording.

The #4 source of referrers is the site: newschoolofphotography.com. When I click on the number to see the actual links, there are many different pages. I can't find any of the pages listed that have any of my images in them. Here are some examples that are listed as specific referring pages:

http://newschoolofphotography.com/general-discussion/24581-big-picture-disaster-unfolds-slowly-gulf-mexico.html

http://newschoolofphotography.com/critique/24545-first-use-strobes.html

http://newschoolofphotography.com/sharing/24510-science-art.html

All claim to have hits on my images, but I can't find anything related to my images in any of those pages. Same goes for some of the other sites listed as referrers. There are some legit referrers so it's not completely busted, but there seem to be plenty of phantom referrers.

Can anyone at Smugmug explain this or look into it?

jfriend · June 7, 2010

b7j0c wrote: »

hi John, this is brad, the stats engineer

while i don't have any particular experience with that site, i can speculate as to why you may not be able to find your images on the referring link

1. the images may be linked in to private messages or some other content that a user on that site might see when logged in

2. the original link may have been expired or deleted

3. the referring link is missing an essential bit. if a url is of the form

http://HOST/PATH/PAGE#ANCHOR

the #ANCHOR part is not carried forward into the referring information. in this case it might be required to see precisely where the photo is linked from

4. the photo may be getting retrieved but not displayed

i know that isn't conclusive, but without knowing more about that site, i'm not sure what to tell you

as always, feel free to email me (brad@smugmug.com), if you need anything

brad

Thanks for responding Brad. I'm still a bit baffled. Let's look at each of those possibilities with regards to one URL from today:

1) Private content. I see no evidence that these pages have any sort of private content. The message at the top of the page says you can read, but you need to log in before you can post. To rule out this issue, I joined the site and viewed the site while logged in. Still no indication of any of my images.

2) Expired or deleted. I picked a referral from today. It is unlikely it's expired between the referral earlier today and just now. Plus there are multiple referrals from this site for today and none of them show content.

3) Referring link missing part. I search the entire source of the page and there's no link that has anything to do with Smugmug. It does not seem that this could be the case of a partial URL. In order for you to record a referral, there has to be enough of a link that it gets to Smugmug's servers. Since I don't have a custom domain, it has to include smugmug.com or one of the other smugmug domains. There are lots of photobucket images in this thread, but nothing from Smugmug.

4) Retrieved, but not displayed. For that to be the case, the page would still have to have a reference to the image. I don't see any such reference in the source of the page or in web developer or in the Firefox media list.

Further, this content of this page simply has nothing to do with any of my images so it's hard to even theorize why one of my images would get put into this thread. The same is true of all the other referred threads I've looked at from this site.

Something seems to be amiss. Multiple referrals from today from this site and none of them shows anything from my site.

Is it possible that lots of referrers are just bogus? That the URL is latched from some previous visit to that site, but actually has nothing to do with any access to my site?

Wrong referrer links?

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