Reffer empty

How come so many reffers are empty

[maxcohen]

Hi,

I have a tracking script in my page that supportds both javascript and html. Almost 50% of the reffers on my page are empty.

I know that when people type in the URL in the adres-bar, the reffer remaines empty. However, the url of my site is almost impossible to type in by accident and known by nobody. The only way someone can get on my site is by clicking a link on one of my other sites.
Search engines seem to give a proper url, so that cannot be the issue. Besides, most search engine haven't even indexed my site.

I don't think many people have disabled the reffer option in there browser (do they?) either.

So how come still almost 50% of my reffers remain empty?

[surfin2u]

It is up to the user's browser to supply your site with a referrer. One of the browsers that I use is Opera and it has an option to disable sending referrer information. I keep that option on, because I access other sites from some pages that I don't want them to know about. It's not that I'm doing something sneaky, it's just that I have password-protected pages for administration of my site, and I don't want some other site to become aware of them and possibly try to hack in.

[cgrantski]

If the links on your other sites open this site in a popup window, IE will show no referrer. And if they've used a bookmark/favourite, there won't be a referrer.

[Receptional]

Another is if you use newsletters. Links from offline source - including email - will not have a referring URL.

We may not have got to 50% yet, but I'm interested in other replies that may come in...

[surfin2u]

I do get referrers from email that I send to people when they click on a link in the email.

[jatar_k]

have you looked through your logs at other data such as ip?

maybe some geo stuff, maybe try to look at where they are coming from.

any more info you can glean about who these users are will help to find some reason.

Are you in a specific niche which has mroe technically savvy users so turning of referers may be more common?

As Receptional mentioned, is it possible your users are coming from somewhere that is limiting reporting the referer?

[Chris_D]

Almost 50% of the reffers on my page are empty

How big was the sample? What was the predominant user agent/ browser?

There are several possible explanations outside your control as a webmaster:

1. There are user toolbars which give the option of 'disabling referrer logging' - e.g. the Chris Pederick toolbar for Firefox.

2. Disabling referrer logging is also a standard feature of opera 8 (under tools > quick preferences)

[marcs]

That info can indeed be turned off in the browser. It can also be turned off by firewall/anti-virus/adware-removal software.

Some corporations also remove/blank that info for any web request leaving their LAN.

[hvostovh]

We experienced the missing Referer fields in our Apache and Webtrends SDC logs since late September 2005.

We have since moved our site to a dedicated server elsewhere, and the Referer information is again in the logs.

It looks as though some ISPs may be blocking Referer information from HTTP headers sent to some IP address blocks.