Web Stats Quick Question

[KeithMcL]

Hi all,

Happy New Year to everyone

I've got Webalizer as my stats program in my CP on my site and I checked out the stats for this month so far.

According to the stats I recieved 200+ hits from a website (wont bother mentioning the name), but when i visited the site I could not find any information to show that there was a link of any sort to my site.

I know it doesn't neccessarily mean that there should be a link, but just that some people are visiting that site and then typing in the URL for my site, but I doubt this is the case.

Can any shed some light on what might be happening here. Do the stats always clearly show were the visits are coming from or is there something else I should know?

Much Appreciated.

[smirk]

From my experience with web stats, I have found out one thing.

Web stats lie.

But, they are still the best thing we have going short of looking over every line of logging.



How closely related is the site to yours?
It also depends on how your tracker does do the site to site trace.

More often than not it will probably be the type in case, because if the link is that obscure, I dont know if you would be getting 200+ hits. As well.. is the first time its happened? You may want to see if the tracking keeps up over time.

I had the same problem with Yahoo! my traffic from there shot up about 600% in one month, but that was because of an ad there, even though I was looking at the search engine refferral stats (about 3000 per month... suddenly 18,000?!?) not the general refferer which was "supposed to be" looked at seperately.



Hope that helps

[jaiem]

Stats programs/scripts aren't 100% accurate. Could be they had a link or a mention of your site there and now it's gone.

[mad-onion]

There is numerous explanations as to why that could happen!

[James]

Might just be that some people visited that site, then went on to visit yours by typing the link in the address bar. I'm not sure if that would actually cause it to be listed as the referrer though - sounds like the only explannation, except of course for inaccurate stats.

[gokhana]

If they type the your url in address bar, there will be no referer so it is not the case in my IHO

[KeithMcL]

So far my forums (www.webdevforums.com) have received 237 hits for this month alone from http://www.unitedcommand.com, which seems to be a FFA links page or something similar.