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After checking my aw stats, it seems that dmoz has spidered me or something.
9 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
DMOZ 1 0.3 % 1 0.3 %
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Does this mean I'm now being reviewed by dmoz or have I been indexed (now in dmoz directory).
Couldn't find me site in dmoz by searching, so I dunno why dmoz is showing in me logs......
If we knew what the actual referer lines for the individual references were, our speculation could be more informed, but still not necessarily conclusive.
Then simply lists each different referring search engine.
I thought this meant where I had links? AW stats shows:
Pages Percent Hits Percent
330 6.7 % 330 2.4 %
Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
- Google 225 225
- Yahoo 55 55
- AOL 22 22
- MSN 18 18
- Other search engines 6 6
- T-Online 1 1
- Overture 1 1
- Netscape 1 1
- DMOZ 1 1
330 6.7 % 330 2.4 %
I presume the numbers (for Google, Yahoo etc) correspond to the amount of links pointing to my site from the engines?
Some of these stats programs are not user-friendly and tough to interpret.
AW shows 'Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list'
I don't think the 'Links from an Internet Search Engine' is the same as 'Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)'. It seems they are different anyway.
All these stats are just for December only. Maybe dmoz viewed my site or something, but I'm more interested in why a dmoz link showed on my stats - it's very strange......
Users and firewalls may block referers, which just means those requests don't include that line -- in other words, you don't know why the surfer chose your URL to visit. And HTTP requestors (bots or browsers) may spoof referers, so that you don't know whether that page REALLY contains a link to you. (That's the "referer porn spam" trick also alluded to above -- 'bots request your page with their doorway page as referer, hoping that URL will get into your logs and from there to Google.) But most of the time for normal browsers, the referer is accurate.
Your log analysis program is undoubtedly classifying page requests looking at the referers and using some sort of heuristic rule.
Is there any way to stop this abuse.......
So some doorway site is giving out false information about me then? Maybe trying to get me banned? Now I'm panicking.
[edited by: bether2 at 2:39 am (utc) on Dec. 16, 2005]
[robotstxt.org...]
But if so, is it just an editor surfing to the site, or reviewing the site for a listing, or using it as a bad example in a discussion, or investigating abuse related to some other site, or stealing your links, or stealing your design for their own site, or plotting world domination with you as the first of many disposable victims? Who knows? In other words, in that respect those hits are no more or less omenous as any other hits on the site.
Don't get paranoid. I know of no reason to suspect conspiratorial activity. But even knowing the exact referer string, I wouldn't try to guess the actual intent.
I say someone from dmoz is winding me up and visiting my site with no intention of reviewing it or indexing it. Why do people do these things, they must be very bored to play such tricks.
Oh, someone may have done a "partial add to reviewed" -- which does create one of those odd-looking referers -- just to look at OUR logs to see if any OTHER editor had done anything with the site. That happens sometimes when someone is talking about the ODP status of a site. (And if there really is one of those very rare problems, we can just silently fix it.
Any SINGLE event in your logs could be what it looks like, or it could be something different. Most of the time, events are simply what they seem: so if you're looking at large numbers and trends, the logs do what you want.
But trying to get too much information about one link (which, after all, may NOT be as it seems) isn't useful.
ODP referers aren't any different than others. They may be genuine -- they usually are... but any one may be someone doing something odd. If one IS someone doing something odd, it's more likely to be a rogue spider doing something sneaky, than an ODP editor picking one site out of tens of millions -- just on the off chance that the webmaster may be puzzled by the log entry (and beyond that, concerned about puzzlement.) Because most people recognize fairly quickly, "oh, well, another apparently insignificant event I don't understand in the world", and let it go at that. And that's the thing to do here.
If you ARE in the mood for puzzling over ODP entries in the logs, chew on this fact: obviously the ACCESS event should come BEFORE any editing event (the editor looks at the site first, then decides what to do about it.) So WHATEVER you can get out of the log entry, it WON'T tell you what the editor hadn't yet decided to do. It CAN'T even tell you whether the editor decided to do anything -- things get interrupted and decisions get deferred. And, (not so obviously) it can't even tell you what sort of decision the editor was planning to make (which is not necessarily the same as the one he ended up making or not making) when he first visited the site.
And finally, an editor in heavy editing mode may open multiple browser tabs to review a site in one tab and edit its listing in another. That kind of review won't show in the logs at all -- there wouldn't necessarily BE a referer. And some editors may be behind firewalls that routinely block referer. So just because there is NO event in the log, doesn't mean a site wasn't reviewed.
In other words: there isn't any reliable information here. It's just a record of a computer event which may have been part of some (unknown and unknowable) human action possibly related to the ODP.
So: no real information, therefore nothing to worry about. What you don't know can't hurt you here.
I say someone from dmoz is winding me up and visiting my site with no intention of reviewing it or indexing it. Why do people do these things, they must be very bored to play such tricks.
I've seen other people fall into this way of thinking when they were anxiously waiting for their site to be listed.
However, from my somewhat limited experience, I would say that it's highly unlikely that someone at ODP is purposely trying to "play tricks" or get you wound up.
With the number of bots and home-made robots scurrying about, it makes me nervous and think sometimes that anyone could go about winding others up. After all, they do it by infecting PC's with nasty viruses etc.
I do have a strong theory why someone would wind others up, entertainment value - but until I see evidence of my site in dmoz, I'll think the worst.
Just out of curiosity, can a site listed in dmoz, be searched by url or company name?
For example "www . example . com" would be searched as "example . com"
You can also search by Company name.
However, the search feature can lag behind listings by a few weeks sometimes.
Relax! It's Christmas!
And also remember, we don't know what the editor might have been intending. I OFTEN visit a whole group of sites with no intent to list any of them -- that is, I'm going through unreviewed suggestions, trying to eliminate the obvious spam and redirect the obvious missubmittals.
So the only question I ask is "is this site OBVIOUSLY spam so I can delete it now?" and "is this site OBVIOUSLY in the wrong place?" I spend as few seconds as possible looking for an obvious answer to the question. If I don't find an obvious answer I leave the suggestion for later review for a listing and for exact placement.
It's just triage. And it's easier (more efficient) to work on just one kind of activity (just deletes, just reviews of promising sites) on just one kind of sites. Remember, editors' reward is a sense of accomplishment: and nobody focuses on efficiency like someone trying to accomplish something.
