Can referral links be faked?

[Jonathan]

I was going through my referral links, and one of them was for www.[yellowdairyproduct].com. Now, my website has nothing at all to do with cheese, and [yellowdairyproduct].com has nothing to do with my website.

So how do such referral links end up in my logs? Is somebody faking them so that I'll check out their website? Or was somebody at that website, and decided to check out mine.

[Key_Master]

Yes, you answered your own question.

Say, CHEESE! :)

[Jonathan]

Huh?

Somebody wants me to check out their site?

Or, somebody went to my site from their site.. either through favorites or typing the url?

[Key_Master]

Somebody probably wants you to check out their site.

Check your log files for a recent example of User Agent and Referrer spoofing.

[chiyo]

we see these completely unrelated links in logs a lot. From various discussions at WMW, it seems that +MAYBE+ these are caused by people opening second windows while in another site and going to yours. In some instances/browsers this seems to register as a referral from that first site. We get "referrals" from p*rn sites in our logs - absolutely no reason why they would link to us, but we guess it is the reason above or some similar glitch.

[Jonathan]

Thanks for the info, guys.

Key_Master, how do you spoof the User Agent and referral url?

[Key_Master]

It's all in the software you use. Sam Spade [samspade.org] is one utility that can do both agent and referrer spoofing. That's what I used on the site listed in your profile.

[JayC]

I just want to second chiyo's explanation; that seems to be the most common reason for such unrelated referrals in my own experience on the sites I work with.

I've even done it inadvertantly myself a couple of times, finding my own IP in a site's log with the apparent referrer being another site I regular visit -- but that has no links to the first site.

[ktmatu]

GNU wget [gnu.org] can also be used for this purpose:

wget http://www.webmasterworld.com/ --referer=http://fake-referrer.example --user-agent=fake-agent

[rzfree]

"people opening second windows" - just saw it in log: a referral from webmasterwold, of course it was me. As it was just few hours ago I can recall what I did: Ctrl+N the WmW window then typed url into address bar. IE 5.0 here.