Weird referrals to non-existent pages

[coachm]

Not sure where to put this, but hope this fits.

For months now, I've been getting visitors referred from some major business magazine site pages, like Inc, Fastcompany, etc, and they are going to non-existent pages on my blog.

The page(s) url's they go to look like this:

mydomain.com/eyewonder/interim.html?url=http://cdn.eyewonder.com/300125/1000038/20001450/exp_Inc.js?interim=http%3A//sometext

For a while we were getting similar stuff, but instead of /eyewonder/ we were getting /doubleclick/

Often the pages visitors are coming from are relevant to our site, but I've checked out the referring pages, and we aren't there. We don't have relationships with any of those large business sites, and are not currently advertising on adwords or other similar agencies.

I know eyewonder and doubleclick, etc are ad servers, but why are they directing visitors to non-existent sub-directories. I've redirected to a more useful page than the default 404, but I'm losing a lot of traffic that might be relevant.

Any ideas of what to do to track this down? Anything sound familiar?

[jhaygood86]

Disclaimer: I work for EyeWonder, a Limelight Networks business, but this isn't the official position or views of the company.

That ad is supposed to be running on the site Inc. The /eyewonder/interim.html file is a PSF (Publisher-Side File) that is used to allow expandable ads to function on certain publisher sites.

As to why your seeing these requests, its very odd. For some reason, our ad thinks that the parent domain of the site we're running in is yours in certain circumstances, not the actual site, based on the behavior you are describing.

[coachm]

Thanks, jhaygood86. Right now, most of these involve eyewonder, but I still get some from doubleclick. They seem to come in bursts. For example, just checked and I had about 25 visits from the same page on Inc, with the same weird referral.

It is strange, and it's not frequent enough to cause bandwidth problems, it seems to only apply to some of my blogs. I've redirected to an explanatory page, but looks like visitors coming in this way end up with zero page views.

It might just be one of those mysteries, but thanks for the response.

[jhaygood86]

Shouldn't be necessary to have the explanatory page. They probably won't see that page, since its an internal request made by our ads (not end user visible).

[SteveWh]

I got those eyewonder ones also for a while last year, but they stopped and I forgot about them.

There are some older browsers (IE6 comes to mind) or browser/plugin combinations (?) that seem to misinterpret which domain they should send requests for external elements of a page to.

It might also be possible that if an element does something that violates the "same-site" policy (not sure I got the name right) or is vulnerable to cross-site scripting, a security plug-in such as NoScript (or perhaps a different "ad-blocker" plug-in) might rewrite that request to not be XSS-vulnerable, which could alter it in a way that makes the request go to the current site rather than the external one.

Just some ideas.

I also see a similar thing resulting from my Amazon ads when the visitor is using some versions (configurations?) of IE6. Pieces of the ads are requested from my site instead of from Amazon, and get 404s.

[coachm]

Jhaygood, could you clarify that? Are you saying that the entries in my log with the referral strings I mentioned aren't people?

I set up redirects so that people coming in from those broken referral pages wouldn't get the standard 404 message, but would receive one specifically for them and offering them places to go.

That IS rather pointless if we aren't dealing with people, but it sure looks like people.

Steve, thanks. I guess it's nothing to worry about, except if it's real people, I don't want to "lose" them, and since the pages they are coming from are usually related to my blog topic, it's more important that I try to keep them.

Some days, big majority of visitors to blog come in that way, mind you if they aren't people....well.