Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with referrers

How do I deal with internal redirects in Google Analytics?

Hartster — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:13:38 -0800

How do I deal with internal redirects in Google Analytics? Our site uses Browserhawk to serve up different content for different audiences. This means whenever a visitor comes to our
site, on the first page they land on, however they get there, they're redirected from page.asp to page.asp?bhcp=1 at the top of the page, and well before the Google Analytics code is reached.

This currently means that Google Analytics does not have a referrer for all new visitors, instead treating them as having come direct.

Now, from Browserhawk I can get that initial referrer on page.asp?bhcp=1, but how do I pass that to Google? Is there a way of overwriting the value that Google uses? Or can I set it up as a custom report and just ignore the default referral report?

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop.

Milkman Dan — Wed, 16 May 2007 10:53:16 -0800

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop. For a few months now, my referral log has been flooded by mildly amusing, but mostly annoying, porn site URLs. These sites are throwing off my data entirely, filling the log with anywhere from 1 to 200 hits each. Almost all of them are over-the-top porn URLs. I want it to stop.

I know what the phenomenon is, and I’ve read all the other AskMe threads about it. I’m not interested in diagnostics, I want to know the cure. I run WordPress, and I’m currently running the Bad Behaviour plug-in, and have been for two months, but the problem has remained. Yes, I run Google Analytics as an alternative, but I’d like to solve the problem within this stats program (Webalizer Version 2.01), too.

Clear, step-by-step instructions would be most helpful, but any suggestions would be much appreciated. Oh, and you can click here to view my referral log from May.

Tracking referrer links and traffic to livejournal?

tastybrains — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:39:37 -0800

What are the best ways to track referrer links & to track traffic to a Livejournal account or community? I am dying to find accurate referrers to a livejournal community and to track the traffic. I've implemented a Sitemeter on the community's profile page, but because LJ disables all javascript, it just gives me a traffic count (and some basic visitor details) to the profile page.

Using Google to look at who is linking to the page is totally inaccurate. When I do that, Google basic terms that are in the title of the community, and search Technorati, I get wildly different results.

I'm really just extremely curious at this point - would love any tips for other resources to figure out who is linking to this particular community.

Where are these referrers coming from?

Taken Outtacontext — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 06:45:58 -0800

In the past few months visits to my Web sites have increased quite a bit. I'd like to think it is my savy style of witty writing but I doubt it. I'm getting an exorbitant number of visits from Google Images to the blog post I made using that image. It's not that someone is bandwidth stealing. It appears that people are somehow finding this image (which isn't anything special) and then viewing the actual blog post.

It's been consistent for at least four weeks. Lots of my images are showing up on Google (I understand that part) but then the people viewing them appear to then be going to my permalinked post on which that image resides from that Google Images page.

Is this some sort of nafarious referrer scam? If not, I'd like to know where the sudden interest in my stuff is coming from (using Google and other sites to do a link search is not showing sites that either use the image or link to my site). Friends are reporting similar behavior on their sites.

Here's an example of the referring URL:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.outtacontext.com/life/images/gift.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.outtacontext.com/life/archive/000278.shtml&h=200&w=212&sz=10&tbnid=XVJYHNKsjxUJ:&tbnh=95&tbnw=101&hl=en&start=

Adult Referrer Sites

thebwit — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:14:00 -0800

For some reason lately the traffic to my site has increased by a lot (about 500+ visitors a day) which nice and all. I have a great script that reads the log files and figures out the stats and I wrote a custom script to track referalls. One thing I noticed though is a large portion of the traffic I receive comes from adult sites that do not link to me. So how is it that on any given day pornwizzard.com can send me 30-40 visitors? Do I really have that many people who read my site after going to pornwizzard (or any other number of adult sites) or are these sites doing something funky trying to just get traffic to their site if I was to randomly put up a last 10 referrals?