Posted by Neredbojias on 10/28/07 16:11

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:59:33 GMT
Athel Cornish-Bowden scribed:

> 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?

I'm not sure how the stat-service does its thing, but maybe the "other
page" has a j/s location.replace() to, erroneously or not, your page.
(Location.replace removes the current page from the history. Whether this
affects referrals, I dunno.)

--
Neredbojias
Just a boogar in the proboscis of life.

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