tourist - 4:56 pm on Nov 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

I've got about 8 cents worth to add here, forgive me if I go on...

Regarding no referrers:

Right-clicking in IE & opening in a new window leaves no referrer. (I do this all the time when I don't want to leave a trail, but it can be a bit of a hassle when feeling extra paranoid. If someone knows some settings to prevent referrers from being sent, I'd love to hear it.) I believe that's also the case if you open a new window for your visitor.

2_much awhile ago mentioned up to 80% with no referrers. Do you use JavaScript navigation on your site? I'm not qualified to say all, but at least some JS navigation methods - like the familiar drop-down box - leave no referrer.

One other method of not leaving a referrer? For sites that like to track visitors with redirect scripts on outbound links - like here ;) - drag the link from the page to your Address Bar & release. [google.com...] Webmaster World didn't see you leave & Google didn't see you coming. :) (Works in IE, not sure about others...)

cornwall ponders caching:

Let us say that the user then clicks an inside page not on the cache. How does that show up on the logs. As a "no referrer" or as "www.mysite.com" or what? For the sake of this example assume that they found me on Google and got the site from their ISPs cache. My understanding is that there would be no record of Google on my log files, but that "www.mysite.com" would show up as the referrer 2. If the last sentence is correct then does anyone have any ideas on roughly what percentage of visitors come from ISP caches

Your understanding has been my experience for the most part. I believe AOL caches the whole page, graphics & all, but that doesn't seem to be the case with some cache servers. I've had a couple of cases where I get a visit from an IP that downloads everything on the page, then a visit minutes later from the same or similar IP with the familiar "Mozilla/3.01 (compatible; )" cache/proxy UA that grabs only the HTML, and then a day or two later the same or similiar IP hits my site and grabs only the graphics with a referrer of mysite.com.

As to what kind of percentages this sort of behaviour represents, I really think it depends on your target audience - or least the type of people who do visit your site. If most visitors come from AOL, then you already know there will be a lot of caching. But if you get "the college crowd," caching of pages seems to be almost nil, in my experience. I figure (many) schools, colleges & universities can't afford the extra cash layout for the necessary hardware.

I'm not familiar with WebTrends - I'm using AWStats while writing my own analyzer because, yes!, the world DOES need another stats program ;) - but if this is how WebTrends works...

- When WebTrends parses the log file, it has to decide for itself which of those events happened first. WebTrends does that during the synchronization process. The event identified as the first of the visitor session is the one that WebTrends looks at for evidence of referral information. - If that event contains reference in the referral field to a page from your Web site, then that page (your page) gets credit as the referring URL.

...then consider this sample from my logs:

64.229.192.122 - - [18/Nov/2002:00:01:16 -0800] "GET /images/navhome.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 2927 "http://www.mysite.com/index.shtml"
64.229.192.122 - - [18/Nov/2002:00:01:16 -0800] "GET /index.shtml HTTP/1.1" 200 20903 "http://www.google.com/...."

Doesn't happen with every visitor I get, but enough that I don't wonder about it anymore. It sounds like WebTrends would miss the fact the visitor actually came from Google. :(