Posted by Athel Cornish-Bowden on 10/28/07 15:59

I was looking at our statistics (compiled by an external service called
awstats) and was surprised to notice that a high proportion of pages
under the heading Liens depuis une page externe (autres sites, hors
moteurs) (i.e. Links from an external page (other sites, other than
search engines)) come from a site that has absolutely no connection
with or relevance to our server. It's a porn site, and as I'm not in
the business of publicizing porn sites I won't give the URL unless it's
absolutely necessary to resolve my query. What is puzzling me is that
there is absolutely nothing in the source code that looks like a link,
whether to our site or anywhere else other than to another page on the
same site. The code is very short, only a few lines, so one can read
the whole of it without fear of missing something. It contains no Flash
or Javascript, and refers to no hidden include files. Amazingly (for a
porn site), it has a valid doctype and is written in valid XHTML
(albeit including the unimaginative line <title>Untitled
Document</title>). I've seen other sites that seem to do the same, i.e.
appear in the statistics listings for no obvious reasons, but these
usually have code that is too long to go through, and involve different
sorts of javascript tricks, so I can't be sure whether they've got
links somewhere that I've missed.

How does one explain this? Is it likely to be a fault in the program
that compiles the statistics (which I can't check as it's on another
site and the code isn't available), or do managers of porn sites have
cunning ways of inserting unwanted information into statistics? Or what?
--
athel

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