No http referer!!

[Pete]

Hi guys, really miffed at the moment. Aprroximately 40% of traffic is being displayed as either an internal referer itself or as no referer. Taking into account bookmarks, timeouts, direct address entrys e.t.c, this is an incredibly high number.

More importantly, many of the searches conducted on the major search engines are often being recorded as either no referers or internal referers (i.e from our site and not the external original source).

Anyone else had experience with this problem?

Is it:
1) search engine stripping http referer field when re-directing ?
2) Dodgy log file generation and hosting (we have had serious problems in the past)
3) Our website page re-directs (do have meta refresh redirects on some of the pages, however number of pages I tested did not)

Any tips. How can we ensure that we capture the origin of the visitor every time. Is it possible?

Thanks,
Pete

[Brett_Tabke]

40% as non-referring or internal referring actually sounds a bit low. Since monday there have been 29780 hits to sew world (non-cgi/non-forum). Of those 3271 had external referring strings (11%). I don't track innnersite referrals. Granted, we have a rather high click-per user ratio (5) and that would account for part of the lower referral to pageview ratio.

It all depends on the type of site you have, what click-per-user rate you are getting (2.5 is average, with 3.5 being considered good and 4+ excellent).