General Discussions

**Scurvy** · 12-27-2006, 11:39 AM

Two of my sites have recently been getting random referrals from pages all over the world. My link certainly doesn't feature on any of these pages (they're usually the index page too), I am not running any ad campaigns, nor do half of these sites show ads of any kind.

I can't see any immediate dangers, apart from the fact that it's completely buggering up my referrals statistics.

I've asked my host if there's anything they can do or speculate as to what it is, and there isn't. Does anyone here know what might be happening? More importantly, what can I do to stop it?

**ADAM Web Design** · 12-27-2006, 01:05 PM

You're not the only one who has seen this, Scurvy. I'm seeing a bunch of them as of late.

My hunch is that it's a toolbar in the http://www.stumbleupon.com vein (except that stumbleupon.com tends to leave a referral trail) and people are just surfing sites at random. I don't know of any other toolbars that offer the whole "random surfing" thing off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're out there.

It might even be stumbleupon.com . Do you get a lot of referrals from them as well? (My one site generates over 130 referrals a day on average now.)

**stOx** · 12-27-2006, 01:18 PM

Sometimes people refer spam hoping that you have some kind of public web-stats or blog-like Linkback system that may result in them getting a backlink or a few visitors.

I have even had referrers to my site with a user agent like "hello, visit my site at www.domain.com, Thanks".

**Scurvy** · 12-27-2006, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

You're not the only one who has seen this, Scurvy. I'm seeing a bunch of them as of late.

My hunch is that it's a toolbar in the http://www.stumbleupon.com vein (except that stumbleupon.com tends to leave a referral trail) and people are just surfing sites at random. I don't know of any other toolbars that offer the whole "random surfing" thing off the top of my head, but I'm sure they're out there.

It might even be stumbleupon.com . Do you get a lot of referrals from them as well? (My one site generates over 130 referrals a day on average now.)

I did wonder if it had something to do with Stumble Upon. Thing is, I've checked out a few of the URLs and non of them have been listed on SU. One of my sites was receiving hits via SU for a good month before this started happening. I'm wondering if it's something to do with the recent upgrade they've made?